SPORT / Dave Zirin : When Muhammad Ali Took the Weight
Muhammad Ali, the former Cassius Clay, was convicted by a U.S. federal court in Houston on June 20, 1967. Above, he is shown when refusing induction at the Houston draft board, April 28, 1967. At his right is the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
This day in history:
When Muhammad Ali took the weight
By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / June 20, 2011
In an era defined by endless war, we should recognize a day in history that won’t be celebrated on Capitol Hill or in the White House. On June 20, 1967, the great Muhammad Ali was convicted in Houston for refusing induction in the U.S. armed forces.
Ali saw the war in Vietnam as an exercise in genocide. He also used his platform as boxing champion to connect the war abroad with the war at home, saying, "Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?”
For these statements, as much as the act itself, Judge Joe Ingraham handed down the maximum sentence to Cassius Clay” (as they insisted upon calling him in court): five-years in a federal penitentary and a $10,000 fine. The next day, this was the top-flap story for The New York Times with the headline, “Clay Guilty in Draft Case; Gets Five Years in Prison.”
The sentence was unusually harsh and deeply tied to a Beltway, bipartisan consensus to crush Ali and ensure that he not develop into a symbol of anti-war resistance. The day of Ali's conviction the U.S. Congress voted 337-29 to extend the draft four more years. They also voted 385-19 to make it a federal crime to desecrate the flag. Their fears of a rising movement against the war were well-founded.
The summer of 1967 marked a tipping point for public support of the Vietnam “police action.” While the Tet Offensive, which exposed the lie that the United States was winning the war, was still six months away, the news out of Southeast Asia was increasingly grim. At the time of Ali’s conviction, 1,000 Vietnamese noncombatants were being killed each week by U.S. forces. One hundred U.S. soldiers were dying every day, and the war was costing $2 billion a month.
Anti-war sentiment was growing and it was thought that a stern rebuke of Ali would help put out the fire. In fact, the opposite took place. Ali’s brave stance fanned the flames.
As Julian Bond said,
[It] reverberated through the whole society... [Y]ou could hear people talking about it on street corners. It was on everyone's lips. People who had never thought about the war before began to think it through because of Ali. The ripples were enormous.
Ali himself vowed to appeal the conviction, saying,
I strongly object to the fact that so many newspapers have given the American public and the world the impression that I have only two alternatives in this stand -- either I go to jail or go to the Army. There is another alternative, and that alternative is justice. If justice prevails, if my constitutional rights are upheld, I will be forced to go neither to the Army nor jail. In the end, I am confident that justice will come my way, for the truth must eventually prevail.
Already, by this point, Ali’s heavyweight title had been stripped, beginning a three-and-a-half-year exile. Already Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam had begun to distance themselves from their most famous member. Already, Ali had become a punching bag for almost every reporter with a working pen.
But with his conviction came a new global constituency. In Guyana, protests against his sentence took place in front of the U.S. embassy. In Karachi, Pakistan, a hunger strike began in front of the U.S. consulate. In Cairo, demonstrators took to the streets. In Ghana, editorials decried his conviction. In London, an Irish boxing fan named Paddy Monaghan began a long and lonely picket of the U.S. Embassy.
Over the next three years, he would collect more than 20,000 signatures on a petition calling for the restoration of Muhammad Ali's heavyweight title.
Ali at this point was beginning to see himself as someone who had a greater responsibility to an international groundswell that saw him as more than an athlete.
Boxing is nothing, just satisfying to some bloodthirsty people. I'm no longer a Cassius Clay, a Negro from Kentucky. I belong to the world, the black world. I'll always have a home in Pakistan, in Algeria, in Ethiopia. This is more than money.
Eventually justice did prevail and the Supreme Court overturned Ali’s conviction in 1971. They did so only after the consensus on the war had changed profoundly. Ali had been proven right by history, although a generation of people in [Southeast] Asia and the United States paid a terrible price along the way.
Years later, upon reflection, Ali said he had no regrets.
Some people thought I was a hero. Some people said that what I did was wrong. But everything I did was according to my conscience. I wasn't trying to be a leader. I just wanted to be free. And I made a stand all people, not just black people, should have thought about making, because it wasn't just black people being drafted. The government had a system where the rich man's son went to college, and the poor man's son went to war. Then, after the rich man's son got out of college, he did other things to keep him out of the Army until he was too old to be drafted.
As we remain mired in a period of permanent war, take a moment and consider the risk, sacrifice, and principle necessary to dismantle the war machine. We all can’t be boxing champions, but moving forward, all who oppose war can rightfully claim Ali’s brave history as our own.
[Dave Zirin is the author of Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love (Scribner) and just made the new documentary Not Just a Game. Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. This article was also posted at The Nation blogs. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]
The Rag Blog
Posted by thorne dreyer at 5:21 PM
Labels: Dave Zirin, Muhammad Ali, Rag Bloggers, Sports, War Resisters
Friday, June 24, 2011
Permanent US Iraq and Afghanistan Occupations Planned - by Stephen Lendman- Immediate Withdrawal Off All U.S. Troops From Both Spots
Friday, June 24, 2011
Permanent US Iraq and Afghanistan Occupations Planned
Permanent US Iraq and Afghanistan Occupations Planned - by Stephen Lendman
Nothing reveals Washington's imperial agenda better than its global empire of bases. Sixty-six years post-WW II, America maintains dozens in Germany, Japan, Italy, and South Korea alone.
In total, known Pentagon bases way exceed 1,000, as well as perhaps hundreds of other shared and secret ones in about 150 countries on every continent despite no enemies anywhere justifying them.
In his 2006 book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic," Chalmers Johnson discussed the known numbers at the time by size and branch of service. He also highlighted the fallout, including oppressive noise, pollution, environmental destruction, expropriation of valuable public and private land, and drunken, disorderly, abusive soldiers committing rape, murder, and other crimes, often unpunished under provisions of US-imposed Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs).
Currently, Pentagon bases infest Middle East/North African/Central Asian countries. In fact, at least 88 dot Iraq alone, including:
-- permanent, city-sized Main Operating Bases (MOBs); for example, Balad Air Base in northern Iraq covers 16 square miles plus another 12-mile security perimeter; these are large and permanent, have extensive infrastructure, command and control headquarters, accommodations for families in combat-free areas, hospitals, schools, recreational facilities, and nearly everything found in US cities; similar MOBs include Camp Adder in southern Iraq, Al-Asad Air Base in the west, and Victory Base Complex, compromising nine bases, including Camp Victory around Baghdad's International Airport;
-- Forward Operating Sites (FOSs), also major but smaller than MOBs; and
-- Cooperative Security Locations (CLSs) - smaller facilities to preposition weapons, munitions, and modest troop numbers.
These type bases span Afghanistan, besides ongoing expansion and construction of major facilities for permanent occupation.
Known major sites include Bagram, Kandahar, and Mazar-e-Sharif air bases. Frontline airfields include Herat, Jalalabad, and a dozen or more others, besides hundreds of large and smaller Pentagon facilities according to Tomdispatch.com writer Nick Turse in his February 10, 2010 article titled, "Totally Occupied: 700 Military Bases Spread Across Afghanistan."
Citing "official sources," he said a "base-building boom" began in 2009 for US and Afghan forces. It's ongoing for permanent occupation, including a new Camp Leatherneck and Camp Bastion 11,500 foot all-weather concrete/asphalt runway and air traffic control tower, as well as a Shindand Air Field 9,000 foot runway completed last December. Moreover, spare parts and other supplies have been stockpiled for permanency, not departure, Obama's withdrawal duplicity notwithstanding. More about it below.
Washington, in fact, came to Iraq and Afghanistan to stay. Doing so confirms a hostile presence occupied populations detest, including angry South Koreans and Japanese against continued US occupation. In less developed countries, social movements want America pushed back or expelled altogether to regain their sovereign independence, free from US imperial wars, injustice, fallout, and shame when their own nations participate.
Last February, puppet president Karzai confirmed Washington's demand for permanent bases, claiming they're in Afghanistan's interest. In fact, US and other NATO leaders agreed on a "transition strategy" last year in Lisbon to hand over control to Afghan forces by 2014. At the time, vice president Biden called it a "drop dead date." He lied. So did Obama like he did earlier, saying withdrawing US forces would begin in July 2011.
In December 2009, Obama announced 30,000 more troops for Afghanistan to enable withdrawals beginning in 18 months, insisting at the time America has no permanent occupation plans. He lied again like he's repeatedly done throughout his tenure, knowing America came to Iraq and Afghanistan to stay.
Moreover, when he took office in January 2009, 34,000 troops were in Afghanistan. By December, he tripled the number to 100,000. Cutting back incrementally by a third if, in fact, done, will still leave double the force in place from when his tenure began.
Nonetheless, on June 22, he addressed the nation, saying:
"(S)tarting next month, we will be able to remove 10,000 of our troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year, and we will bring home a total of 33,000 by next summer (to let) Afghan security forces (take) the lead. Our mission will change from combat to support. By 2014, this process of transition will be complete...."
False! A large US presence will remain permanently. Drone and other air attacks will continue, killing civilians called militants. Obama's duplicity is politically motivated with November 2012 in mind to assure enough support for reelection despite falling approval ratings.
War-weary Americans, in fact, are increasingly burdened during economic hard times. As a result, polls show growing opposition to conflicts. Congressman Dennis Kucinich said "Things are falling apart at home while we (keep) searching the world looking for dragons to slay."
Pollster Peter Brown added:
"I do not think there is any doubt (that) Afghanistan, the involvement in Iraq, and now (in) Libya has for many Americans raised questions about the wisdom of these policies."
The Brookings Institution's Stephen Hess explained that "(a) trio of wars is not exactly what Americans are interested in at this time when they have a very full platter of problems at home," harming them gravely.
In fact, when unpopular wars take precedence over pocket book issues, people react angrily, perhaps enough to deny Obama a second term if conditions deteriorate more between now and November 2012.
Obama also bogusly claimed significant Afghanistan gains, saying "we've inflicted serious losses on the Taliban and taken a number of its strongholds....(T)he tide of war is receding (and) the light of a secure peace can be seen in the distance" when it's nowhere in sight in an endless cauldron of death and destruction, affecting US forces like Afghans.
In fact, according to a US Army colonel wishing to remain anonymous, telling Time magazine:
"The mendacity is getting so egregious that I am fast losing the ability to remain quiet. These yarns of 'significant progress' are being covered up by the blood and limbs of hundreds - HUNDREDS - of American uniformed service members each and every month, and you know that the rest of this summer is going to see the peak of that bloodshed."
He added that America's ability to achieve a secure handover to Afghan forces is "sheer madness, and so far as I can tell, in the mainstream media and reputable publications, it is going almost entirely without challenge." Moreover, the same holds for Pakistan where drone kills enrage people to resist, perpetuating endless conflict.
After a decade of war and occupation, in fact, America won't admit it lost and leave. Instead, massive bloodshed continues to create the illusion of progress Obama hopes will help reelect him, mindless that what matters most are pocket book issues, especially when during hard times they go begging.
June 7 - 9 Zogby International polling numbers reflect growing voter disapproval, showing 43% approve Obama's performance. Only 38% say he deserves reelection. Besides domestic issues, it reflects growing disenchantment with endless wars, including against Libya that most Americans oppose.
Once closer to November 2012, force-fed austerity to finance them may cost sitting politicians their jobs, even Obama if voters think he spurned them when they most need help. For beleaguered Iraqis and Afghans, however, it hardly matters if America came to stay.
A Final Comment
Controlling Eurasia's vast oil and gas reserves explains why America plans permanent Iraq and Afghanistan occupations, terror bombs Libya, and heads toward possible general war by threatening Syria, Iran, and perhaps other states to fuel its insatiable military-industrial appetite.
Washington's strategy also includes encroaching close to Russian and Chinese borders to diminish their military and economic challenge, as well as potential greater dominance by establishing closer ties, thereby weakening America.
The policy is fraught with dangers, the same ones Barbara Tuchman explained in her 1962 book, "The Guns of August," on how WW I began and its early weeks. Once started, things spun out of control with cataclysmic consequences, including over 20 million dead, many millions wounded, and a generation of young men lost before it ended.
As a result, igniting another global conflict should give everyone pause, including militarists and war profiteers sacrificing sanity, security, and prosperity for inconsequential ephemeral gains by comparison.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
posted by Steve Lendman @ 1:01 AM
Permanent US Iraq and Afghanistan Occupations Planned
Permanent US Iraq and Afghanistan Occupations Planned - by Stephen Lendman
Nothing reveals Washington's imperial agenda better than its global empire of bases. Sixty-six years post-WW II, America maintains dozens in Germany, Japan, Italy, and South Korea alone.
In total, known Pentagon bases way exceed 1,000, as well as perhaps hundreds of other shared and secret ones in about 150 countries on every continent despite no enemies anywhere justifying them.
In his 2006 book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic," Chalmers Johnson discussed the known numbers at the time by size and branch of service. He also highlighted the fallout, including oppressive noise, pollution, environmental destruction, expropriation of valuable public and private land, and drunken, disorderly, abusive soldiers committing rape, murder, and other crimes, often unpunished under provisions of US-imposed Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs).
Currently, Pentagon bases infest Middle East/North African/Central Asian countries. In fact, at least 88 dot Iraq alone, including:
-- permanent, city-sized Main Operating Bases (MOBs); for example, Balad Air Base in northern Iraq covers 16 square miles plus another 12-mile security perimeter; these are large and permanent, have extensive infrastructure, command and control headquarters, accommodations for families in combat-free areas, hospitals, schools, recreational facilities, and nearly everything found in US cities; similar MOBs include Camp Adder in southern Iraq, Al-Asad Air Base in the west, and Victory Base Complex, compromising nine bases, including Camp Victory around Baghdad's International Airport;
-- Forward Operating Sites (FOSs), also major but smaller than MOBs; and
-- Cooperative Security Locations (CLSs) - smaller facilities to preposition weapons, munitions, and modest troop numbers.
These type bases span Afghanistan, besides ongoing expansion and construction of major facilities for permanent occupation.
Known major sites include Bagram, Kandahar, and Mazar-e-Sharif air bases. Frontline airfields include Herat, Jalalabad, and a dozen or more others, besides hundreds of large and smaller Pentagon facilities according to Tomdispatch.com writer Nick Turse in his February 10, 2010 article titled, "Totally Occupied: 700 Military Bases Spread Across Afghanistan."
Citing "official sources," he said a "base-building boom" began in 2009 for US and Afghan forces. It's ongoing for permanent occupation, including a new Camp Leatherneck and Camp Bastion 11,500 foot all-weather concrete/asphalt runway and air traffic control tower, as well as a Shindand Air Field 9,000 foot runway completed last December. Moreover, spare parts and other supplies have been stockpiled for permanency, not departure, Obama's withdrawal duplicity notwithstanding. More about it below.
Washington, in fact, came to Iraq and Afghanistan to stay. Doing so confirms a hostile presence occupied populations detest, including angry South Koreans and Japanese against continued US occupation. In less developed countries, social movements want America pushed back or expelled altogether to regain their sovereign independence, free from US imperial wars, injustice, fallout, and shame when their own nations participate.
Last February, puppet president Karzai confirmed Washington's demand for permanent bases, claiming they're in Afghanistan's interest. In fact, US and other NATO leaders agreed on a "transition strategy" last year in Lisbon to hand over control to Afghan forces by 2014. At the time, vice president Biden called it a "drop dead date." He lied. So did Obama like he did earlier, saying withdrawing US forces would begin in July 2011.
In December 2009, Obama announced 30,000 more troops for Afghanistan to enable withdrawals beginning in 18 months, insisting at the time America has no permanent occupation plans. He lied again like he's repeatedly done throughout his tenure, knowing America came to Iraq and Afghanistan to stay.
Moreover, when he took office in January 2009, 34,000 troops were in Afghanistan. By December, he tripled the number to 100,000. Cutting back incrementally by a third if, in fact, done, will still leave double the force in place from when his tenure began.
Nonetheless, on June 22, he addressed the nation, saying:
"(S)tarting next month, we will be able to remove 10,000 of our troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year, and we will bring home a total of 33,000 by next summer (to let) Afghan security forces (take) the lead. Our mission will change from combat to support. By 2014, this process of transition will be complete...."
False! A large US presence will remain permanently. Drone and other air attacks will continue, killing civilians called militants. Obama's duplicity is politically motivated with November 2012 in mind to assure enough support for reelection despite falling approval ratings.
War-weary Americans, in fact, are increasingly burdened during economic hard times. As a result, polls show growing opposition to conflicts. Congressman Dennis Kucinich said "Things are falling apart at home while we (keep) searching the world looking for dragons to slay."
Pollster Peter Brown added:
"I do not think there is any doubt (that) Afghanistan, the involvement in Iraq, and now (in) Libya has for many Americans raised questions about the wisdom of these policies."
The Brookings Institution's Stephen Hess explained that "(a) trio of wars is not exactly what Americans are interested in at this time when they have a very full platter of problems at home," harming them gravely.
In fact, when unpopular wars take precedence over pocket book issues, people react angrily, perhaps enough to deny Obama a second term if conditions deteriorate more between now and November 2012.
Obama also bogusly claimed significant Afghanistan gains, saying "we've inflicted serious losses on the Taliban and taken a number of its strongholds....(T)he tide of war is receding (and) the light of a secure peace can be seen in the distance" when it's nowhere in sight in an endless cauldron of death and destruction, affecting US forces like Afghans.
In fact, according to a US Army colonel wishing to remain anonymous, telling Time magazine:
"The mendacity is getting so egregious that I am fast losing the ability to remain quiet. These yarns of 'significant progress' are being covered up by the blood and limbs of hundreds - HUNDREDS - of American uniformed service members each and every month, and you know that the rest of this summer is going to see the peak of that bloodshed."
He added that America's ability to achieve a secure handover to Afghan forces is "sheer madness, and so far as I can tell, in the mainstream media and reputable publications, it is going almost entirely without challenge." Moreover, the same holds for Pakistan where drone kills enrage people to resist, perpetuating endless conflict.
After a decade of war and occupation, in fact, America won't admit it lost and leave. Instead, massive bloodshed continues to create the illusion of progress Obama hopes will help reelect him, mindless that what matters most are pocket book issues, especially when during hard times they go begging.
June 7 - 9 Zogby International polling numbers reflect growing voter disapproval, showing 43% approve Obama's performance. Only 38% say he deserves reelection. Besides domestic issues, it reflects growing disenchantment with endless wars, including against Libya that most Americans oppose.
Once closer to November 2012, force-fed austerity to finance them may cost sitting politicians their jobs, even Obama if voters think he spurned them when they most need help. For beleaguered Iraqis and Afghans, however, it hardly matters if America came to stay.
A Final Comment
Controlling Eurasia's vast oil and gas reserves explains why America plans permanent Iraq and Afghanistan occupations, terror bombs Libya, and heads toward possible general war by threatening Syria, Iran, and perhaps other states to fuel its insatiable military-industrial appetite.
Washington's strategy also includes encroaching close to Russian and Chinese borders to diminish their military and economic challenge, as well as potential greater dominance by establishing closer ties, thereby weakening America.
The policy is fraught with dangers, the same ones Barbara Tuchman explained in her 1962 book, "The Guns of August," on how WW I began and its early weeks. Once started, things spun out of control with cataclysmic consequences, including over 20 million dead, many millions wounded, and a generation of young men lost before it ended.
As a result, igniting another global conflict should give everyone pause, including militarists and war profiteers sacrificing sanity, security, and prosperity for inconsequential ephemeral gains by comparison.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
posted by Steve Lendman @ 1:01 AM
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- The Time Of Frankie’s Carnival Time
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing his song Jersey Girl that formed part of the inspiration for this post.
An old man walks, walks haltingly down a North Adamsville street, maybe Hancock Street, or maybe a street just off it, a long street like West Main Street, he has forgotten which exactly in the time between his walking and his telling me his story. Near the high school anyway, North Adamsville High School, where he graduated from back in the mist of time, the 1960s mist of time. A time when he was known, far and wide, as the king, the king hell king, if the truth be known, of the schoolboy be-bop night. And headquartered, properly headquartered, at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor as was his due as the reigning schoolboy king of the night. But that schoolboy corner boy king thing is an old story, an old story strictly for cutting up old torches, according to the old man, Frankie, yes, Francis Xavier Riley, as if back from the dead, and not fit, not fit by a long shot for what he has to tell me about his recent “discovery,” and its meaning.
Apparently as Frankie, let us skip the formalities and just call him Frankie, walked down that nameless, maybe unnamable street he was stricken by sight of a sign on a vagrant telephone pole announcing that Jim Byrd’s Carnival and Traveling Show was coming to town and setting up tent at the Veteran’s Stadium in the first week in June, this past June, for the whole week. And seeing this sign, this vagrant sign on this vagrant telephone pole, set off a stream of memories from when the king hell king of the schoolboy corner boy night was so enthralled with the idea of the “carny” life, of this very Jim Byrd’s Carnival and Traveling Show carnival life, that he had plans, serious plans, to run away, run away with it when it left town. Condition, and of course there was always a condition: if Ma Riley, or Pa Riley if it came to it, although Pa was usually comfortably ensconced in the Dublin Pub over on Sagamore Street and was not a big factor in Frankie’s life when it came time for him to make his mark as king hell king, just bothered him one more time, bothered about what was never specified.
In any case rather than running away with the carnival Frankie served his high school corner boy term as king hell king, went to college and then to law school, ran a successful mid-sized law practice, raised plenty of kids and political hell and never looked back. And not until he saw that old-time memory sign did he think of regrets for not having done what he said that “he was born for.” And rather than have the reader left with another in the endless line of cautionary tales, or of two roads, one not taken tales, or any of that, Frankie, Frankie in his own words, wants to expand on his carnival vision reincarnation:
Who knows when a kid first gets the carnival bug, maybe it was down in cradle times hearing the firecrackers in the heated, muggy Fourth Of July night when in old, old time North Adamsville a group of guys, a group of guys called the “Associates”, mainly Dublin Pub guys, and at one time including my father, Joe Riley, Senior, grabbed some money from around the neighborhood. And from the local merchants like Doc over at Doc’s Drug Store, and Mario over at Estrella’s Grocery Store, Mac, owner of the Dublin Pub, and always, always, Tonio, owner of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor. What they did with this money was to hire a small time, usually very small time, carnival outfit, something with a name like Joe’s Carny, or the like, maybe with a merry-go-round, some bumping cars, a whip thing, a few one-trick ponies, and ten or twelve win-a-doll-for-your-lady tents. On the side maybe a few fried dough, pizza, sausage and onions kind of eateries, with cotton candy to top it off. And in a center tent acts, clown acts, trapeze acts with pretty girls dangling every which way, jugglers, and the like. Nothing fancy, no three-ring circus, or monster theme amusement park to flip a kid’s head stuff. Like I say small time, but not small time enough to not enflame the imagination of every kid, mainly every boy kid, but a few girls too if I remember right, with visions of setting up their own show.
Or maybe it was when this very same Jim Byrd, a dark-haired, dark-skinned (no, not black, not in 1950s North Adamsville, christ no, but maybe a gypsy or half-gypsy, if that is possible). A friendly guy, slightly wiry, a slightly side-of-his-mouth-talking guy just like a lawyer, who actually showed me some interesting magic tricks when I informed him, aged eight, that I wanted to go “on the road” with him first brought his show to town. Brought it to Veteran’s Stadium then too. That’s when I knew that that old time Associates thing, that frumpy Fourth of July set-up-in-a-minute-thing-and-then-gone was strictly amateur stuff. See Jim’s had a Ferris wheel, Jim had a Mini-Roller Coaster, and he had about twenty-five or thirty win-a-doll, cigarettes, teddy bears, or candy tents. But also shooting galleries, gypsy fortune-telling ladies with daughters with black hair and laughing eyes selling roses, or the idea of roses. And looking very foxy, the daughters that is, although I did not know what foxy was then. Oh ya, sure Jim had the ubiquitous fried dough, sausage and onion, cardboard pizza stuff too. Come on now this was a carnival, big time carnival, big time to an eight year old carnival. Of course he had that heartburn food. But what set Jim’s operation off was that central tent. Sure, yawn, he had the clowns, tramp clowns, Clarabelle clowns, what have you, and the jugglers, juggling everything but mainly a lot of whatever it was they were juggling , and even the acrobats, bouncing over each other like rubber balls. The big deal, the eight year old big deal though, was the animals, the real live tigers and lions that performed in a cage in center stage with some blonde safari-weary tamer doing the most incredible tricks with them. Like, well, like having them jump through hoops, and flipping over each other and the trainer too. Wow.
But now that I think about it seriously the real deal of the carny life was not either the Associates or Jim Byrd’s, although after I tell you about this Jim’s would enter into my plans because that was the carnival, the only carnival I knew, to run away with. See down in Huntsville, a town on the hard ocean about twenty miles from North Adamsville there was what would now be called nothing but an old-time amusement park, a park like you still might see if you went to Seaside Heights down on the Jersey shore. This park, this Wild Willie’s Amusement Park, was the aces although as you will see not a place to run away to since everything stayed there, summer open or winter closed. I was maybe nine or ten when I first went there but the story really hinges on when I was just turning twelve, you know, just getting ready to make my mark on the world, the world being girls. Yes, that kind of turning twelve. But nine or twelve this Wild Willie’s put even Jim Byrd’s show to shame. Huge roller-coasters (yes, the plural is right, three altogether), a wild mouse, whips, dips, flips and very other kind of ride, covered and uncovered, maybe fifteen or twenty, all based on the idea of trying to make you scared, and want to go on again, and again to “conquer” that scared. And countless win things (ya, cigarettes, dolls, teddy bears, candy, and so on in case you might have forgotten). I won’t even mention that hazardous to your health but merciful, fried dough, cardboard pizza (in about twenty flavors), sausage and onions, cotton candy and salt water taffy because, frankly I am tired of mentioning it and even a flea circus or a flea market today would feel compelled to offer such treats so I will move on.
What it had that really got me going, at first anyway, was about six pavilions worth of pinball machines, all kinds of pinball machines just like today there are a zillion video games at such places. But what these pinball machines had (beside alluring come-hither and spend some slot machine dough on me pictures of busty young women on the faces of the machines) were guys, over sixteen year old teenage guys, mainly, some older, some a lot older at night, who could play those machines like wizards, racking up free games until the cows came home. I was impressed, impressed to high heaven. And watching them, watching them closely were over sixteen year old girls, some older, some a lot older at night, who I wondered, wondered at when I was nine but not twelve might not be interfering with their pinball magic. Little did I know then that the pinball wizardry was for those sixteen year old, some older, some a lot older girls.
But see, if you didn’t already know, nine or twelve-year old kids were not allowed to play those machines. You had to be sixteen (although I cadged a few free games left on machines as I got a little older, and I think the statute of limitations has run out on this crime so I can say not sixteen years or older). So I gravitated toward the skee ball games located in one of those pinball pavilions, games that anybody six to sixty or more could play. You don’t know skees. Hey where have you been? Skee, come on now. Go over to Seaside Heights on the Jersey shore, or Old Orchard up on the Maine coast and you will have all the skees you want, or need. And if you can’t waggle your way to those hallowed spots then I will give a little run-down. It’s kind of like bowling, candle-pin bowling (small bowling balls for you non-New Englanders) with a small ball and it’s kind of like archery or darts because you have to get the balls, usually ten or twelve to a game, into tilted holes.
The idea is to get as high a score as possible, and in amusement park land after your game is over you get coupons depending on how many points you totaled. And if you get enough points you can win, well, a good luck rabbit’s foot, like I won for Karen stick-girl (a stick girl was a girl who didn’t yet have a shape, a womanly shape, and maybe that word still is used, okay) one time, one turning twelve-year old time, who thought I was the king of the night one time because I gave her one from my “winning,” and maybe still does. Still does think I am king of the hill. But a guy, an old corner boy guy that I knew back then, a kind of screwy guy who hung onto my tail at Salducci’s like I was King Solomon, a guy named Markin, already wrote that story once. Although he got one part wrong, the part about how I didn’t know right from left about girls and gave this Karen stick girl the air when, after showering her with that rabbit’s foot, she wanted me to go with her and sit on the old seawall down at Huntsville Beach and I said no-go. I went, believe me I went, and we both practically had lockjaw for two weeks after we got done. But you know how stories get twisted when third parties who were not there, had no hope of being there, and had questionable left from right girl knowledge themselves start their slanderous campaigns on you. Yes, you know that scene, I am sure.
So you see, Karen stick and lockjaw aside, I had some skill at skees, and the way skees and the carny life came together was when, well let me call her Gypsy Love, because like the name of that North Adamsville vagrant telephone pole street where I saw the Byrd’s carnival in town sign that I could not remember the name of I swear I can’t, or won’t remember her’s. All I remember those is that jet-black long hair, shiny dark-skinned glean (no, no again, she was not black, christ, no way, not in 1950s Wild Willie’s, what are you kidding me?), that thirteen-year old winsome smile, half innocent, half-half I don’t know what, that fast-forming girlish womanly shape and those laughing, Spanish gypsy black eyes that would haunt a man’s sleep, or a boy’s. And that is all I need to remember, and you too if you have any imagination. See Gypsy Love was the daughter of Madame La Rue, the fortune-teller in Jim Byrd’s carnival. I met her in turning twelve time when she tried to sell me a rose, rose for my girlfriend, my non-existent just then girlfriend. Needless to say I was immediately taken with her and told her that although I had no girlfriend I would buy her a rose.
And that, off and on, over the next year is where we bounced around in our “relationship.” One day I was down at Wild Willie’s and I spotted her and asked her why she wasn’t on the road with Jim Byrd’s show. Apparently Madame LaRue had had a falling out with Jim, quit the traveling show and landed a spot at Wild Willie’s. And naturally Gypsy Love followed mother, selling flowers to the rubes at Wild Willie’s. So naturally, naturally to me, I told Gypsy Love to follow me over to the skees and I would win her a proper prize. And I did, I went crazy that day. A big old lamp for her room. And Gypsy Love asked me, asked me very nicely thank you, if I wanted to go down by the seawall and sit for a while. And let’s get this straight, no third party who wasn’t there, no wannbe there talk, please, I followed her, followed her like a lemming to the sea. And we had the lockjaw for a month afterward to prove it. And you say, you dare to say I was not born for that life, that carnival life. Ha.
An old man walks, walks haltingly down a North Adamsville street, maybe Hancock Street, or maybe a street just off it, a long street like West Main Street, he has forgotten which exactly in the time between his walking and his telling me his story. Near the high school anyway, North Adamsville High School, where he graduated from back in the mist of time, the 1960s mist of time. A time when he was known, far and wide, as the king, the king hell king, if the truth be known, of the schoolboy be-bop night. And headquartered, properly headquartered, at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor as was his due as the reigning schoolboy king of the night. But that schoolboy corner boy king thing is an old story, an old story strictly for cutting up old torches, according to the old man, Frankie, yes, Francis Xavier Riley, as if back from the dead, and not fit, not fit by a long shot for what he has to tell me about his recent “discovery,” and its meaning.
Apparently as Frankie, let us skip the formalities and just call him Frankie, walked down that nameless, maybe unnamable street he was stricken by sight of a sign on a vagrant telephone pole announcing that Jim Byrd’s Carnival and Traveling Show was coming to town and setting up tent at the Veteran’s Stadium in the first week in June, this past June, for the whole week. And seeing this sign, this vagrant sign on this vagrant telephone pole, set off a stream of memories from when the king hell king of the schoolboy corner boy night was so enthralled with the idea of the “carny” life, of this very Jim Byrd’s Carnival and Traveling Show carnival life, that he had plans, serious plans, to run away, run away with it when it left town. Condition, and of course there was always a condition: if Ma Riley, or Pa Riley if it came to it, although Pa was usually comfortably ensconced in the Dublin Pub over on Sagamore Street and was not a big factor in Frankie’s life when it came time for him to make his mark as king hell king, just bothered him one more time, bothered about what was never specified.
In any case rather than running away with the carnival Frankie served his high school corner boy term as king hell king, went to college and then to law school, ran a successful mid-sized law practice, raised plenty of kids and political hell and never looked back. And not until he saw that old-time memory sign did he think of regrets for not having done what he said that “he was born for.” And rather than have the reader left with another in the endless line of cautionary tales, or of two roads, one not taken tales, or any of that, Frankie, Frankie in his own words, wants to expand on his carnival vision reincarnation:
Who knows when a kid first gets the carnival bug, maybe it was down in cradle times hearing the firecrackers in the heated, muggy Fourth Of July night when in old, old time North Adamsville a group of guys, a group of guys called the “Associates”, mainly Dublin Pub guys, and at one time including my father, Joe Riley, Senior, grabbed some money from around the neighborhood. And from the local merchants like Doc over at Doc’s Drug Store, and Mario over at Estrella’s Grocery Store, Mac, owner of the Dublin Pub, and always, always, Tonio, owner of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor. What they did with this money was to hire a small time, usually very small time, carnival outfit, something with a name like Joe’s Carny, or the like, maybe with a merry-go-round, some bumping cars, a whip thing, a few one-trick ponies, and ten or twelve win-a-doll-for-your-lady tents. On the side maybe a few fried dough, pizza, sausage and onions kind of eateries, with cotton candy to top it off. And in a center tent acts, clown acts, trapeze acts with pretty girls dangling every which way, jugglers, and the like. Nothing fancy, no three-ring circus, or monster theme amusement park to flip a kid’s head stuff. Like I say small time, but not small time enough to not enflame the imagination of every kid, mainly every boy kid, but a few girls too if I remember right, with visions of setting up their own show.
Or maybe it was when this very same Jim Byrd, a dark-haired, dark-skinned (no, not black, not in 1950s North Adamsville, christ no, but maybe a gypsy or half-gypsy, if that is possible). A friendly guy, slightly wiry, a slightly side-of-his-mouth-talking guy just like a lawyer, who actually showed me some interesting magic tricks when I informed him, aged eight, that I wanted to go “on the road” with him first brought his show to town. Brought it to Veteran’s Stadium then too. That’s when I knew that that old time Associates thing, that frumpy Fourth of July set-up-in-a-minute-thing-and-then-gone was strictly amateur stuff. See Jim’s had a Ferris wheel, Jim had a Mini-Roller Coaster, and he had about twenty-five or thirty win-a-doll, cigarettes, teddy bears, or candy tents. But also shooting galleries, gypsy fortune-telling ladies with daughters with black hair and laughing eyes selling roses, or the idea of roses. And looking very foxy, the daughters that is, although I did not know what foxy was then. Oh ya, sure Jim had the ubiquitous fried dough, sausage and onion, cardboard pizza stuff too. Come on now this was a carnival, big time carnival, big time to an eight year old carnival. Of course he had that heartburn food. But what set Jim’s operation off was that central tent. Sure, yawn, he had the clowns, tramp clowns, Clarabelle clowns, what have you, and the jugglers, juggling everything but mainly a lot of whatever it was they were juggling , and even the acrobats, bouncing over each other like rubber balls. The big deal, the eight year old big deal though, was the animals, the real live tigers and lions that performed in a cage in center stage with some blonde safari-weary tamer doing the most incredible tricks with them. Like, well, like having them jump through hoops, and flipping over each other and the trainer too. Wow.
But now that I think about it seriously the real deal of the carny life was not either the Associates or Jim Byrd’s, although after I tell you about this Jim’s would enter into my plans because that was the carnival, the only carnival I knew, to run away with. See down in Huntsville, a town on the hard ocean about twenty miles from North Adamsville there was what would now be called nothing but an old-time amusement park, a park like you still might see if you went to Seaside Heights down on the Jersey shore. This park, this Wild Willie’s Amusement Park, was the aces although as you will see not a place to run away to since everything stayed there, summer open or winter closed. I was maybe nine or ten when I first went there but the story really hinges on when I was just turning twelve, you know, just getting ready to make my mark on the world, the world being girls. Yes, that kind of turning twelve. But nine or twelve this Wild Willie’s put even Jim Byrd’s show to shame. Huge roller-coasters (yes, the plural is right, three altogether), a wild mouse, whips, dips, flips and very other kind of ride, covered and uncovered, maybe fifteen or twenty, all based on the idea of trying to make you scared, and want to go on again, and again to “conquer” that scared. And countless win things (ya, cigarettes, dolls, teddy bears, candy, and so on in case you might have forgotten). I won’t even mention that hazardous to your health but merciful, fried dough, cardboard pizza (in about twenty flavors), sausage and onions, cotton candy and salt water taffy because, frankly I am tired of mentioning it and even a flea circus or a flea market today would feel compelled to offer such treats so I will move on.
What it had that really got me going, at first anyway, was about six pavilions worth of pinball machines, all kinds of pinball machines just like today there are a zillion video games at such places. But what these pinball machines had (beside alluring come-hither and spend some slot machine dough on me pictures of busty young women on the faces of the machines) were guys, over sixteen year old teenage guys, mainly, some older, some a lot older at night, who could play those machines like wizards, racking up free games until the cows came home. I was impressed, impressed to high heaven. And watching them, watching them closely were over sixteen year old girls, some older, some a lot older at night, who I wondered, wondered at when I was nine but not twelve might not be interfering with their pinball magic. Little did I know then that the pinball wizardry was for those sixteen year old, some older, some a lot older girls.
But see, if you didn’t already know, nine or twelve-year old kids were not allowed to play those machines. You had to be sixteen (although I cadged a few free games left on machines as I got a little older, and I think the statute of limitations has run out on this crime so I can say not sixteen years or older). So I gravitated toward the skee ball games located in one of those pinball pavilions, games that anybody six to sixty or more could play. You don’t know skees. Hey where have you been? Skee, come on now. Go over to Seaside Heights on the Jersey shore, or Old Orchard up on the Maine coast and you will have all the skees you want, or need. And if you can’t waggle your way to those hallowed spots then I will give a little run-down. It’s kind of like bowling, candle-pin bowling (small bowling balls for you non-New Englanders) with a small ball and it’s kind of like archery or darts because you have to get the balls, usually ten or twelve to a game, into tilted holes.
The idea is to get as high a score as possible, and in amusement park land after your game is over you get coupons depending on how many points you totaled. And if you get enough points you can win, well, a good luck rabbit’s foot, like I won for Karen stick-girl (a stick girl was a girl who didn’t yet have a shape, a womanly shape, and maybe that word still is used, okay) one time, one turning twelve-year old time, who thought I was the king of the night one time because I gave her one from my “winning,” and maybe still does. Still does think I am king of the hill. But a guy, an old corner boy guy that I knew back then, a kind of screwy guy who hung onto my tail at Salducci’s like I was King Solomon, a guy named Markin, already wrote that story once. Although he got one part wrong, the part about how I didn’t know right from left about girls and gave this Karen stick girl the air when, after showering her with that rabbit’s foot, she wanted me to go with her and sit on the old seawall down at Huntsville Beach and I said no-go. I went, believe me I went, and we both practically had lockjaw for two weeks after we got done. But you know how stories get twisted when third parties who were not there, had no hope of being there, and had questionable left from right girl knowledge themselves start their slanderous campaigns on you. Yes, you know that scene, I am sure.
So you see, Karen stick and lockjaw aside, I had some skill at skees, and the way skees and the carny life came together was when, well let me call her Gypsy Love, because like the name of that North Adamsville vagrant telephone pole street where I saw the Byrd’s carnival in town sign that I could not remember the name of I swear I can’t, or won’t remember her’s. All I remember those is that jet-black long hair, shiny dark-skinned glean (no, no again, she was not black, christ, no way, not in 1950s Wild Willie’s, what are you kidding me?), that thirteen-year old winsome smile, half innocent, half-half I don’t know what, that fast-forming girlish womanly shape and those laughing, Spanish gypsy black eyes that would haunt a man’s sleep, or a boy’s. And that is all I need to remember, and you too if you have any imagination. See Gypsy Love was the daughter of Madame La Rue, the fortune-teller in Jim Byrd’s carnival. I met her in turning twelve time when she tried to sell me a rose, rose for my girlfriend, my non-existent just then girlfriend. Needless to say I was immediately taken with her and told her that although I had no girlfriend I would buy her a rose.
And that, off and on, over the next year is where we bounced around in our “relationship.” One day I was down at Wild Willie’s and I spotted her and asked her why she wasn’t on the road with Jim Byrd’s show. Apparently Madame LaRue had had a falling out with Jim, quit the traveling show and landed a spot at Wild Willie’s. And naturally Gypsy Love followed mother, selling flowers to the rubes at Wild Willie’s. So naturally, naturally to me, I told Gypsy Love to follow me over to the skees and I would win her a proper prize. And I did, I went crazy that day. A big old lamp for her room. And Gypsy Love asked me, asked me very nicely thank you, if I wanted to go down by the seawall and sit for a while. And let’s get this straight, no third party who wasn’t there, no wannbe there talk, please, I followed her, followed her like a lemming to the sea. And we had the lockjaw for a month afterward to prove it. And you say, you dare to say I was not born for that life, that carnival life. Ha.
Obama Math- One Hundred Thousand Minus Thirty Thousand Equals Seventy Thousand And Draw Down- Our Anti-War Math- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan
Click on the headline to link to an article analyzing American President Barack Obama's announcement of his long awaited troop draw down plans for Afghanistan
Markin comment:
No one ever said that math, even simple arithmetic, was a qualification for the American imperial presidency. For that matter that skill is not required in order to be a revolutionary opponent of that presidency, although it helps. As noted in the headline Obama’s math is skewed, skewed by the hard fact that his politically calculated decision to draw down thirty thousand troops still leaves him coming into the 2012 American presidential war/circus with troop levels higher than on day one of his administration. Some “peace” candidate. So here is the solution, everybody knows zero, or at least when they have nothing, nothing in their pockets, nothing to pay the rent or mortgage with, nothing to take care of life’s bills with. So today’s a big step math day. Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan! No dough, no person-got it.
Markin comment:
No one ever said that math, even simple arithmetic, was a qualification for the American imperial presidency. For that matter that skill is not required in order to be a revolutionary opponent of that presidency, although it helps. As noted in the headline Obama’s math is skewed, skewed by the hard fact that his politically calculated decision to draw down thirty thousand troops still leaves him coming into the 2012 American presidential war/circus with troop levels higher than on day one of his administration. Some “peace” candidate. So here is the solution, everybody knows zero, or at least when they have nothing, nothing in their pockets, nothing to pay the rent or mortgage with, nothing to take care of life’s bills with. So today’s a big step math day. Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan! No dough, no person-got it.
Monday, June 20, 2011
From The Archives Of The International Communist League- The Stalinist School Of Falsification Revisited A Reply To The "Guardian", Part Three-THE "THIRD PERIOD"
Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
***********
When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973
Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
*******
The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited
These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]
Reply to the Guardian
THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED
3. THE "THIRD PERIOD"
Stalin's consistent rightist course during 1926-27 led him to capitulate to the kulaks (rich peasants) at home, to the trade-union bureaucrats during the British general strike, to Chiang Kai-shek in China. He backed up this policy by a bloc in the Politburo with Bukharin, who had called on the peasants to "enrich yourselves" and projected the building of socialism "at a snail Is pace." The Left Opposition led by Trotsky opposed this line, warning that it not only meant the massacre of thousands of foreign Communists but ultimately threatened the very foundations of the Soviet state itself. Stalin "answered" at the 15th party congress (December 1927) by summarily expelling the Opposition and formally declaring that "adherence to the opposition and propaganda of its views [is] incompatible with membership in the party."
Trotsky's predictions were dramatically confirmed by the kulak rebellion of 1927-28. The state granaries were half empty and starvation threatened the cities; grain collections produced riots in the villages, as the peasants (who could obtain little in the way of manufactured goods in return for the inflated currency) refused to sell at state-regulated prices. Suddenly in January 1928 Stalin switched to a tougher line, ordering armed expeditions to requisition grain stocks. But even this was not enough. In May he was still declaring that "expropriation of kulaks would be folly" (Problems of Leninism, p. 221), but by the end of the year he argued: "Can we permit the expropriation of kulaks...? A ridiculous question....We must breakdown the resistance of that class in open battle" (Problems of Leninism, p. 325). Such dramatic reversals of policy were a constant for Stalin.
Since 1924 Trotsky had been campaigning for industrialization and collectivization and was branded by Stalin as an "enemy of the peasant" and "super-industrializer." But faced with an anti-Soviet peasant revolt in 1928, Stalin recoiled in utter panic, switching from blind conservatism to blind adventurism. In the 1927 Platform of the Joint Opposition, Trotsky and Zinoviev called for doubling the growth rate of the first five-year plan; Stalin now tripled it, at the price of tremendous suffering for the workers. The Opposition called for voluntary collectivization aided by state credits for cooperatives and a struggle against the influence of the kulak; Stalin now accomplished the forced collectivization in half of all farms in the Soviet Union in the space of four months! The peasants responded by sabotage, killing off more than 50 percent of the horses in the country, and a civil war which during the next several years cost more than three million lives.
Trotsky opposed the collectivization-at-machine-gun-point as a monstrosity. Marxists had always called for the gradual winning over of the petty bourgeoisie by persuasion and a voluntary transition to socialism through cooperative production. The industrialization, however, despite the incredible disorganization and unnecessary hardships caused by bureaucratic planning, he praised:
"The success of the Soviet Union in industrial development is acquiring global historical significance....That tempo is neither stable nor secure...but it provides practical proof of the immense possibilities inherent in socialist economic methods."
--L. D. Trotsky, "Economic Recklessness and its Perils," 1930
Both the collectivization and industrialization fully vindicated the policies of the Opposition. To represent a return to Leninism, however, they required the complement of re-establishment of Soviet and party democracy. The bankruptcy of his previous policies sharply revealed by the crisis, Stalin took the opposite course, reinforcing his bureaucratic dictatorship and expelling Trotsky from the Soviet Union.
Stalin Discovers a "Third Period"
Stalin's policies in the Communist International (CI) were a duplicate of his domestic zigzags. After the disaster of the Shanghai insurrection of 1927, in which he ordered the Chinese Communists to lay down their arms to the butcher Chiang Kai-shek, he sharply reversed course and ordered, the adventuristic Canton Commune which ended in a similar massacre of the workers. In the summer of 1928 Stalin generalized this pattern of reckless ultra-leftism into the doctrine of a "third period" of imperialism.
According to this "theory" there was a post-war revolutionary wave ending in 1923, a period of stabilization until 1928 and then a new period of the imminent and final collapse of capitalism. Like the catastrophists of today, Stalin reasoned that economic crisis would automatically create a revolutionary situation. In fact the early stages of a crisis are frequently accompanied by sharp demoralization in the working class. And it is noteworthy that at no time during 1928-32 did any Communist party in the world attempt to seize power! (Subsequently Stalin quietly abandoned his bombastic theory as he made a sharp turn to the right.)
The onset of the depression and the Comintern's ultra-left policies wreaked havoc in the Communist parties. In the key country of Western Europe, Germany, a combination of mass layoffs and the CP's policy of abandoning the trade unions resulted in the percentage of factory workers in the party falling from 62 percent in 1928 to only 20 percent in 1931, effectively turning the Communists into the vanguard of the unemployed rather than the workers. Typical for the pathetic results of "Third Period" adventurism were the May Day demonstrations of 1929 which had been prohibited by the capitalist governments: in Paris the police simply arrested all active CP members on 30 April (releasing them three days later). In Berlin the social-democratic police chief Zoergiebel brutally attacked the Communists, whose call for a general strike fizzled.
Another aspect of the "Third Period" policies was the practice of setting up small "revolutionary unions," counterposed to the reformist-led mass organizations. Communists favor trade-union unity, but do not oppose every split. It may be necessary to break with the restrictive craft unions in order to organize mass-production workers. Also, when a left-wing upsurge is prevented from taking power solely by bureaucratic and gangster methods, a break with the old organization may be the only alternative to defeat. The key is support of the overwhelming majority of the workers, enabling the union to survive as a mass organization.
The "Third Period" dual unionism, considered a matter of principle, was quite different. It led to the formation of separate trade-union federations (the Trade Union Unity League [TUUL] in the U.S. and the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition [RGO] in Germany), and countless tiny "red unions" with a few score members, which never had any chance of success. The "red union" policy is directly opposed to the Leninist policy of struggling for Communist leadership of the existing mass workers, organizations, and with the exception of a few isolated situations it was doomed to defeat.
"Social-Fascism"
A generalization of this policy was Stalin's discovery that the reformist social-democratic parties were "social-fascist," i.e., "socialist in words, fascist in deeds." Since they were therefore no longer part of the workers movement (like the social-democratic-led unions'), the tactic of united front was not applicable and Communists could at most offer a "united front from below," that is simply calling on rank-and-file Social Democrats and trade unionists to desert their leaders.
The social-democratic leaders prepared the way for fascism--about this there can be no doubt. In January 1919 the Social Democrat Noske personally organized the massacre of hundreds of German revolutionary workers in repressing the "Spartacus Uprising" in Berlin; among the martyrs were Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the top leaders of the German CP. In 1929 the Social Democrat Zoergiebel drowned the CP May Day march in blood. At every step on Hitler's road to power the reformists capitulated rather than fight. And even after Hitler had already taken power, instead of organizing the massive resistance they had promised, social-democratic leaders offered to support the Nazi government's foreign policy in the vain hope of thereby saving their party from destruction! They never fought until it was too late, and in the last analysis they preferred Hitler to revolution.
But this is not at all the same as saying, as did Stalin, that the Social Democracy was only the "left wing of fascism." This philistine statement ignored the fact that the organizations of Social Democracy and the unions themselves would be destroyed as the result of a fascist victory. As
Trotsky wrote:
"Fascism is not merely a system of reprisals, of brutal force, and of police terror. Fascism is a particular governmental system based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society. The task of fascism lies not only in destroying the Communist vanguard....It is also necessary to smash all independent and voluntary organizations, to demolish all the defensive bulwarks of the proletariat, and to uproot whatever has been achieved during three-quarters of a century by the Social Democracy and the trade unions."
--"What Next?," January 1932
Here was a situation that cried out for the policy of the united front. The leaders did not want to fight but to retreat. The rank and file, however, could not retreat--they had to fight or face annihilation. Call on the social-democratic leadership to mount a united offensive against the Nazis! If they accept, the fascist menace could be destroyed and the road opened to revolution. If they refuse, their treachery is clearly exposed before the workers and the revolutionary mobilization of the working class is aided by demonstrating in struggle that the communists are the only consistent proletarian leadership. In Trotsky's words:
"Worker-Communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anyplace; there are not enough passports for you. Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory."
--"For a Workers' United Front Against Fascism," December 1931
"After Hitler--Us"
Right up to Hitler's seizure of power Stalin continued to follow out the sectarian-defeatist logic of the "Third Period." After the September 1930 elections, in which the Nazis' vote jumped from 800,000 to more than six million, the head of the German CP, Ernest Thaelmann, told the Comintern Executive, "...14 September was in a sense Hitler's best day after which there would be no better but only worse days." The CI endorsed this view and called on the CP to "concentrate fire on the Social-Fascists "! The Stalinists ridiculed Trotsky's analysis of fascism, and claimed there was no difference between the Brüning regime and the Nazis. In other words, they were entirely indifferent whether the workers' organizations existed or not! Remmele, a CP leader, declared in the Reichstag (parliament), "Let Hitler take office--he will soon go bankrupt, and then it will be our day." Consistent with this criminal and utterly cowardly policy, the CP joined together with the Nazis in an (unsuccessful) attempt to unseat the social-democratic Prussian state government (the "Red Plebiscite" of 1931)!
In response to the wide support Trotsky's call for a united front found among German workers, Thaelmann replied in September 1932:
"In his pamphlet on how National Socialism is to be defeated, Trotsky gives one answer only, and it is this: the German Communist Party must join hands with the Social Democratic Party....Either, says he, the Communist party makes common cause with the Social Democrats, or the German working class is lost for ten or twenty years. This is the theory of an utterly bankrupt Fascist and counter-revolutionary....Germany will of course not go fascist--our electoral victories are a guarantee of this. [!]"
Nine months later Thaelmann was sitting in Hitler's jails. He was later executed by the Nazis, as were thousands of Communist and Social-Democratic militants, and the workers parties and trade unions were crushed by the iron heel of fascism. Trotsky's analyses and policies were fully confirmed--and the German proletariat paid the price of Stalin's criminal blindness.
But this did not put an end to Stalin's betrayals. Trotsky had earlier warned, "We must tell the advanced workers as loudly as we can: after the 'third period' of recklessness and boasting the fourth period of panic and capitulation has set in" ("Germany, The Key to the International Situation," November 1931). The tragedy continued to unfold with clockwork precision. Following Hitler's assumption of power, the Comintern, seized with panic, forbade any discussion of the German events in the Communist parties and dropped all mention of social-fascism. Instead, in a manifesto "To the Workers of All Countries" (5 March 1933) the Executive called for a united front with the social-democratic leaders (which they had rejected for the past five years), and for the CPs to "abandon all attacks against the Social Democratic organizations during the joint action"!
The United Front
Carl Davidson's series on "Trotsky's Heritage" in the Guardian is a
consistent whitewash of Stalin's crimes against the workers movement in an attempt to make a case for the Stalinist policies of "socialism in one country," "peaceful coexistence," "two-stage revolution," etc. In dealing with the events around Hitler's rise to power Davidson claims "the Trotskyists cover up for the political force that actually paved the way to power for the fascists--the German Social-Democrats" (Guardian, 9 May 1973). The reader can judge for himself from the above just who paved the way for fascism! Davidson goes on to remark, "This is not to say that the German Communist party made no mistakes or that their errors were insignificant....They also made a number of ultra-'left' errors, including a one-sided emphasis on the 'united front from below,' rather than a more persistent effort at unity with the Social-Democratic leaders as well, even if this was turned down." Davidson neglects to point out that at every point the policy of the German CP was dictated by Stalin himself, and repeatedly confirmed by Comintern meetings!
The Stalinists consistently try to blur the working-class content of Lenin's united-front policy (whose main slogan was "class against class") in order to confuse it with Stalin's "popular front" with the "democratic" bourgeoisie. They seek to portray the united front as a tactic of class collaboration and capitulation to the social-democratic leadership. This has led some groups, such as the Progressive Labor Party (PL), to reject the tactic of united front altogether:
"As we have repeatedly pointed out, we reject the concept of a united front with bosses. We reject the concept of a united front with Trotskyists and the herd of various fakes on the left....
"We believe in a united front from below that takes the form of a left-center coalition."
--"Road to Revolution III," PL, November 1973
The united front from below, i.e., calling on the ranks to desert the reformist leaders, is always in order. But we cannot simply ignore these misleaders without resigning the vanguard to sterile isolation. Replying to opponents of the united front during the early years of the Communist International, Trotsky wrote:
"Does the united front extend only to the working masses or doesn't it also include the opportunist leaders?
"The very posing of this question is a product of misunderstanding.
"If we were able simply to unite the working masses around our own banner or around our practical immediate slogans, and skip over reformist organizations, whether party or trade union, that would of course be the best thing in the world....
"...in order not to lose their influence over the workers reformists are compelled, against the innermost desires of their own leaders, to support the partial movements of the exploited against the exploiters....
"...we are, apart from all other considerations, interested in dragging the reformists from their asylums and placing them alongside ourselves before the eyes of the struggling masses."
--"On the United Front,' 1922
These theses were approved by the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and by the Executive Committee of the CI. In his polemic against the ultra-lefts (Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder) Lenin called for using "every opportunity to gain a mass ally, no matter how temporary, vacillating, unreliable, and adventitious. Whoever hasn't been able to get that into his head doesn't understand an iota of Marxism, and of contemporary scientific socialism in general."
After refusing for five years to unite with the social-democratic leaders, Stalin in March 1933 flip-flopped completely and agreed to a "united front" which prohibited the freedom of criticism. This meant the Communists pledged themselves in advance to remain silent in the face of the inevitable betrayals by the reformists, just as Stalin refused to criticize and break with the British trade-union leaders when they smashed the 1926 general strike. How little this has to do with Bolshevism can be appreciated by reading the original Comintern resolution on the united front:
"Imposing on themselves a discipline of action, it is obligatory that Communists should preserve for themselves, not only up to and after action, but if necessary even during action, the right and possibility of expressing their opinion on the policy of all working-class organizations without exception. The rejection of this condition is not permissible under any circumstances."
--"Theses on the United Front," 1922
The Soviet Union--A Degenerated Workers State
The definitive betrayal by Stalin in Germany, and the necessary conclusion of calling for new communist parties and a new international, led to the question of a new party inside the Soviet Union itself. This, in turn, brought up again the question of the class character of the Soviet state and the nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy which ruled it. Trotsky refused to consider the USSR "state capitalist" as did many former Communists who had been expelled by Stalin. To do so would imply that there could be a peaceful counterrevolution, "running the film of reformism in reverse," so to speak. Fundamentally the state is based on the property forms, which represent the interests of particular classes. The socialist property relations in the Soviet Union remained intact, and this colossal conquest of the October Revolution must not be lightly abandoned. While opposing the bureaucratic Stalinist leadership, Bolshevik-Leninists must unconditionally defend the USSR from imperialist attack.
At the same time, this was no healthy workers state. The proletariat had been politically expropriated. The soviets were simply administrative bodies to rubber-stamp the decisions of the General Secretary. The Bolshevik party was a creature of the bureaucracy, with the entire leadership of 1917 expelled or in disfavor, with the sole exception of Stalin. Given the events of recent years--the expulsions, the arrests and exiling of every oppositionist--it was criminal lightmindedness to believe that this parasitic bureaucracy could be eliminated without revolution. This would not be a social revolution, resulting in new property forms but a political revolution. The USSR was a degenerated workers state:
"...the privileges of the bureaucracy by themselves do not change the bases of the Soviet society, because the bureaucracy derives its privileges not from any special property relations peculiar to it as a 'class,' but from those property relations that have been .created by the October Revolution and that are fundamentally adequate for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
"To put it plainly, insofar as the bureaucracy robs the people (arid this is done in various ways by every bureaucracy), we have to deal not with class exploitation, in the scientific sense of the word, but with social parasitism, although on a very large scale....
"Finally, we may add for the sake of complete clarity: if in the USSR today the Marxist party were in power, it would renovate the entire political regime; it would shuffle and purge the bureaucracy and place it under the control of the masses--it would transform all of the administrative practices and inaugurate a series of capital reforms in the management of economy; but in no case would it have to undertake an overturn in the property relations, i.e., a new social revolution."
--"The Class Nature of the Soviet State," October 1933
The Stalinists immediately screamed "counterrevolution." Trotsky was an agent of Chamberlain, Hitler, the Mikado, etc., and was out to re-establish capitalism, they claimed. But the Stalinists were never able to point to a single instance in which Trotsky refused to support the USSR against imperialism or called for abandoning the socialist property forms. In 1939 on the eve of the Second World War he led a bitter struggle against a group in the American Socialist Workers Party, led by Max Shachtman, which refused to defend Russia against Hitler. Trotsky repeatedly emphasized that as long as the Soviet Union remained a workers state, however badly degenerated, it was a matter of principle to defend it. In the hour of need the Bolshevik-Leninists would stand ready at their battle posts.
In the early 1960's Mao Tse-tung announced that the Khrushchev-Brezhnev leadership of the Soviet Union since 1956 was "social-imperialist," and that the USSR is no longer a workers state but a new imperialism presided over by a "red bourgeoisie." In a recent attack on Trotskyism from a Maoist viewpoint, the pamphlet entitled "From Trotskyism to Social-Imperialism" by Michael Miller of the League for Proletarian Revolution, this position stands in contrast to Trotsky's position:
"In 1956 Khrushchev came on the scene, launching an attack on the dictatorship of the proletariat and spreading petty- bourgeois ideology and culture everywhere....
"Trotskyism has never understood in theory and never learned from practice the class character of the Soviet and Chinese states. During the period of Soviet history when the economic base was being transformed from private to social ownership of the means of production, the Trotskyites always stressed the political structure--the superstructure....The economic base can never be considered apart from the political structure. In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, which is the heart of the political structure, was taken over by a clique of bourgeois-type politicians and transformed into a variant of a big bourgeois political party. Now they are busy implementing economic policies which reverse the socialist economic base, which restore private ownership, private production for the market, and which reproduce on an enormous scale all the corresponding capitalist social relationships."
This passage demonstrates the Maoists' rejection of elementary Marxism. If, as they hold, a peaceful social counterrevolution took place in Russia, then logically a peaceful socialist revolution against capitalism is also possible--a classical social-democratic position which Lenin refuted in State and Revolution. Further, to maintain that such a revolution was accomplished by the appearance of a ruling group with "petty-bourgeois ideology" is idealism, completely counterposed to the Marxist materialist understanding that a social revolution can be accomplished only by an overturn in property relations.
Most important of all are the practical consequences of this policy. Since the USSR is an "imperialist" state according to Mao, it is not necessary to defend it against other capitalist states. In fact, Mao has gone so far as to press for a Sino-Japanese alliance against the Soviet Union and to encourage the retention of NATO as a bulwark against "Soviet imperialism" in Europe! These are the counterrevolutionary implications of the "state capitalist" position put into practice. They raise the specter of an inter-imperialist war with the USSR and China aligned with opposing capitalist powers--an eventuality which would place the socialist property forms of the deformed workers states in immediate danger. Though the Brezhnev clique in Moscow is not so explicit in blocking with capitalist states against China, its willingness to abandon the defense of the workers states in the hopes of achieving an alliance with U.S. imperialism was clearly revealed last year when Nixon was invited to sign a declaration of "peaceful coexistence" in Moscow at the very moment that American planes were carrying out saturation bombing over North Vietnam!
The Trotskyists, in contrast, call for Sino-Soviet unity against imperialism, for unconditional defense of the deformed workers states. At the same time we mercilessly criticize the parasitic bureaucracies who are sabotaging that defense. The advanced workers will recognize the justice of this principled, class position, and reject those such as the Maoists and pro-Moscow Stalinists who criminally abandon the defense of the workers' conquests.
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973
Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
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The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited
These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]
Reply to the Guardian
THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED
3. THE "THIRD PERIOD"
Stalin's consistent rightist course during 1926-27 led him to capitulate to the kulaks (rich peasants) at home, to the trade-union bureaucrats during the British general strike, to Chiang Kai-shek in China. He backed up this policy by a bloc in the Politburo with Bukharin, who had called on the peasants to "enrich yourselves" and projected the building of socialism "at a snail Is pace." The Left Opposition led by Trotsky opposed this line, warning that it not only meant the massacre of thousands of foreign Communists but ultimately threatened the very foundations of the Soviet state itself. Stalin "answered" at the 15th party congress (December 1927) by summarily expelling the Opposition and formally declaring that "adherence to the opposition and propaganda of its views [is] incompatible with membership in the party."
Trotsky's predictions were dramatically confirmed by the kulak rebellion of 1927-28. The state granaries were half empty and starvation threatened the cities; grain collections produced riots in the villages, as the peasants (who could obtain little in the way of manufactured goods in return for the inflated currency) refused to sell at state-regulated prices. Suddenly in January 1928 Stalin switched to a tougher line, ordering armed expeditions to requisition grain stocks. But even this was not enough. In May he was still declaring that "expropriation of kulaks would be folly" (Problems of Leninism, p. 221), but by the end of the year he argued: "Can we permit the expropriation of kulaks...? A ridiculous question....We must breakdown the resistance of that class in open battle" (Problems of Leninism, p. 325). Such dramatic reversals of policy were a constant for Stalin.
Since 1924 Trotsky had been campaigning for industrialization and collectivization and was branded by Stalin as an "enemy of the peasant" and "super-industrializer." But faced with an anti-Soviet peasant revolt in 1928, Stalin recoiled in utter panic, switching from blind conservatism to blind adventurism. In the 1927 Platform of the Joint Opposition, Trotsky and Zinoviev called for doubling the growth rate of the first five-year plan; Stalin now tripled it, at the price of tremendous suffering for the workers. The Opposition called for voluntary collectivization aided by state credits for cooperatives and a struggle against the influence of the kulak; Stalin now accomplished the forced collectivization in half of all farms in the Soviet Union in the space of four months! The peasants responded by sabotage, killing off more than 50 percent of the horses in the country, and a civil war which during the next several years cost more than three million lives.
Trotsky opposed the collectivization-at-machine-gun-point as a monstrosity. Marxists had always called for the gradual winning over of the petty bourgeoisie by persuasion and a voluntary transition to socialism through cooperative production. The industrialization, however, despite the incredible disorganization and unnecessary hardships caused by bureaucratic planning, he praised:
"The success of the Soviet Union in industrial development is acquiring global historical significance....That tempo is neither stable nor secure...but it provides practical proof of the immense possibilities inherent in socialist economic methods."
--L. D. Trotsky, "Economic Recklessness and its Perils," 1930
Both the collectivization and industrialization fully vindicated the policies of the Opposition. To represent a return to Leninism, however, they required the complement of re-establishment of Soviet and party democracy. The bankruptcy of his previous policies sharply revealed by the crisis, Stalin took the opposite course, reinforcing his bureaucratic dictatorship and expelling Trotsky from the Soviet Union.
Stalin Discovers a "Third Period"
Stalin's policies in the Communist International (CI) were a duplicate of his domestic zigzags. After the disaster of the Shanghai insurrection of 1927, in which he ordered the Chinese Communists to lay down their arms to the butcher Chiang Kai-shek, he sharply reversed course and ordered, the adventuristic Canton Commune which ended in a similar massacre of the workers. In the summer of 1928 Stalin generalized this pattern of reckless ultra-leftism into the doctrine of a "third period" of imperialism.
According to this "theory" there was a post-war revolutionary wave ending in 1923, a period of stabilization until 1928 and then a new period of the imminent and final collapse of capitalism. Like the catastrophists of today, Stalin reasoned that economic crisis would automatically create a revolutionary situation. In fact the early stages of a crisis are frequently accompanied by sharp demoralization in the working class. And it is noteworthy that at no time during 1928-32 did any Communist party in the world attempt to seize power! (Subsequently Stalin quietly abandoned his bombastic theory as he made a sharp turn to the right.)
The onset of the depression and the Comintern's ultra-left policies wreaked havoc in the Communist parties. In the key country of Western Europe, Germany, a combination of mass layoffs and the CP's policy of abandoning the trade unions resulted in the percentage of factory workers in the party falling from 62 percent in 1928 to only 20 percent in 1931, effectively turning the Communists into the vanguard of the unemployed rather than the workers. Typical for the pathetic results of "Third Period" adventurism were the May Day demonstrations of 1929 which had been prohibited by the capitalist governments: in Paris the police simply arrested all active CP members on 30 April (releasing them three days later). In Berlin the social-democratic police chief Zoergiebel brutally attacked the Communists, whose call for a general strike fizzled.
Another aspect of the "Third Period" policies was the practice of setting up small "revolutionary unions," counterposed to the reformist-led mass organizations. Communists favor trade-union unity, but do not oppose every split. It may be necessary to break with the restrictive craft unions in order to organize mass-production workers. Also, when a left-wing upsurge is prevented from taking power solely by bureaucratic and gangster methods, a break with the old organization may be the only alternative to defeat. The key is support of the overwhelming majority of the workers, enabling the union to survive as a mass organization.
The "Third Period" dual unionism, considered a matter of principle, was quite different. It led to the formation of separate trade-union federations (the Trade Union Unity League [TUUL] in the U.S. and the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition [RGO] in Germany), and countless tiny "red unions" with a few score members, which never had any chance of success. The "red union" policy is directly opposed to the Leninist policy of struggling for Communist leadership of the existing mass workers, organizations, and with the exception of a few isolated situations it was doomed to defeat.
"Social-Fascism"
A generalization of this policy was Stalin's discovery that the reformist social-democratic parties were "social-fascist," i.e., "socialist in words, fascist in deeds." Since they were therefore no longer part of the workers movement (like the social-democratic-led unions'), the tactic of united front was not applicable and Communists could at most offer a "united front from below," that is simply calling on rank-and-file Social Democrats and trade unionists to desert their leaders.
The social-democratic leaders prepared the way for fascism--about this there can be no doubt. In January 1919 the Social Democrat Noske personally organized the massacre of hundreds of German revolutionary workers in repressing the "Spartacus Uprising" in Berlin; among the martyrs were Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the top leaders of the German CP. In 1929 the Social Democrat Zoergiebel drowned the CP May Day march in blood. At every step on Hitler's road to power the reformists capitulated rather than fight. And even after Hitler had already taken power, instead of organizing the massive resistance they had promised, social-democratic leaders offered to support the Nazi government's foreign policy in the vain hope of thereby saving their party from destruction! They never fought until it was too late, and in the last analysis they preferred Hitler to revolution.
But this is not at all the same as saying, as did Stalin, that the Social Democracy was only the "left wing of fascism." This philistine statement ignored the fact that the organizations of Social Democracy and the unions themselves would be destroyed as the result of a fascist victory. As
Trotsky wrote:
"Fascism is not merely a system of reprisals, of brutal force, and of police terror. Fascism is a particular governmental system based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society. The task of fascism lies not only in destroying the Communist vanguard....It is also necessary to smash all independent and voluntary organizations, to demolish all the defensive bulwarks of the proletariat, and to uproot whatever has been achieved during three-quarters of a century by the Social Democracy and the trade unions."
--"What Next?," January 1932
Here was a situation that cried out for the policy of the united front. The leaders did not want to fight but to retreat. The rank and file, however, could not retreat--they had to fight or face annihilation. Call on the social-democratic leadership to mount a united offensive against the Nazis! If they accept, the fascist menace could be destroyed and the road opened to revolution. If they refuse, their treachery is clearly exposed before the workers and the revolutionary mobilization of the working class is aided by demonstrating in struggle that the communists are the only consistent proletarian leadership. In Trotsky's words:
"Worker-Communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anyplace; there are not enough passports for you. Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory."
--"For a Workers' United Front Against Fascism," December 1931
"After Hitler--Us"
Right up to Hitler's seizure of power Stalin continued to follow out the sectarian-defeatist logic of the "Third Period." After the September 1930 elections, in which the Nazis' vote jumped from 800,000 to more than six million, the head of the German CP, Ernest Thaelmann, told the Comintern Executive, "...14 September was in a sense Hitler's best day after which there would be no better but only worse days." The CI endorsed this view and called on the CP to "concentrate fire on the Social-Fascists "! The Stalinists ridiculed Trotsky's analysis of fascism, and claimed there was no difference between the Brüning regime and the Nazis. In other words, they were entirely indifferent whether the workers' organizations existed or not! Remmele, a CP leader, declared in the Reichstag (parliament), "Let Hitler take office--he will soon go bankrupt, and then it will be our day." Consistent with this criminal and utterly cowardly policy, the CP joined together with the Nazis in an (unsuccessful) attempt to unseat the social-democratic Prussian state government (the "Red Plebiscite" of 1931)!
In response to the wide support Trotsky's call for a united front found among German workers, Thaelmann replied in September 1932:
"In his pamphlet on how National Socialism is to be defeated, Trotsky gives one answer only, and it is this: the German Communist Party must join hands with the Social Democratic Party....Either, says he, the Communist party makes common cause with the Social Democrats, or the German working class is lost for ten or twenty years. This is the theory of an utterly bankrupt Fascist and counter-revolutionary....Germany will of course not go fascist--our electoral victories are a guarantee of this. [!]"
Nine months later Thaelmann was sitting in Hitler's jails. He was later executed by the Nazis, as were thousands of Communist and Social-Democratic militants, and the workers parties and trade unions were crushed by the iron heel of fascism. Trotsky's analyses and policies were fully confirmed--and the German proletariat paid the price of Stalin's criminal blindness.
But this did not put an end to Stalin's betrayals. Trotsky had earlier warned, "We must tell the advanced workers as loudly as we can: after the 'third period' of recklessness and boasting the fourth period of panic and capitulation has set in" ("Germany, The Key to the International Situation," November 1931). The tragedy continued to unfold with clockwork precision. Following Hitler's assumption of power, the Comintern, seized with panic, forbade any discussion of the German events in the Communist parties and dropped all mention of social-fascism. Instead, in a manifesto "To the Workers of All Countries" (5 March 1933) the Executive called for a united front with the social-democratic leaders (which they had rejected for the past five years), and for the CPs to "abandon all attacks against the Social Democratic organizations during the joint action"!
The United Front
Carl Davidson's series on "Trotsky's Heritage" in the Guardian is a
consistent whitewash of Stalin's crimes against the workers movement in an attempt to make a case for the Stalinist policies of "socialism in one country," "peaceful coexistence," "two-stage revolution," etc. In dealing with the events around Hitler's rise to power Davidson claims "the Trotskyists cover up for the political force that actually paved the way to power for the fascists--the German Social-Democrats" (Guardian, 9 May 1973). The reader can judge for himself from the above just who paved the way for fascism! Davidson goes on to remark, "This is not to say that the German Communist party made no mistakes or that their errors were insignificant....They also made a number of ultra-'left' errors, including a one-sided emphasis on the 'united front from below,' rather than a more persistent effort at unity with the Social-Democratic leaders as well, even if this was turned down." Davidson neglects to point out that at every point the policy of the German CP was dictated by Stalin himself, and repeatedly confirmed by Comintern meetings!
The Stalinists consistently try to blur the working-class content of Lenin's united-front policy (whose main slogan was "class against class") in order to confuse it with Stalin's "popular front" with the "democratic" bourgeoisie. They seek to portray the united front as a tactic of class collaboration and capitulation to the social-democratic leadership. This has led some groups, such as the Progressive Labor Party (PL), to reject the tactic of united front altogether:
"As we have repeatedly pointed out, we reject the concept of a united front with bosses. We reject the concept of a united front with Trotskyists and the herd of various fakes on the left....
"We believe in a united front from below that takes the form of a left-center coalition."
--"Road to Revolution III," PL, November 1973
The united front from below, i.e., calling on the ranks to desert the reformist leaders, is always in order. But we cannot simply ignore these misleaders without resigning the vanguard to sterile isolation. Replying to opponents of the united front during the early years of the Communist International, Trotsky wrote:
"Does the united front extend only to the working masses or doesn't it also include the opportunist leaders?
"The very posing of this question is a product of misunderstanding.
"If we were able simply to unite the working masses around our own banner or around our practical immediate slogans, and skip over reformist organizations, whether party or trade union, that would of course be the best thing in the world....
"...in order not to lose their influence over the workers reformists are compelled, against the innermost desires of their own leaders, to support the partial movements of the exploited against the exploiters....
"...we are, apart from all other considerations, interested in dragging the reformists from their asylums and placing them alongside ourselves before the eyes of the struggling masses."
--"On the United Front,' 1922
These theses were approved by the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and by the Executive Committee of the CI. In his polemic against the ultra-lefts (Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder) Lenin called for using "every opportunity to gain a mass ally, no matter how temporary, vacillating, unreliable, and adventitious. Whoever hasn't been able to get that into his head doesn't understand an iota of Marxism, and of contemporary scientific socialism in general."
After refusing for five years to unite with the social-democratic leaders, Stalin in March 1933 flip-flopped completely and agreed to a "united front" which prohibited the freedom of criticism. This meant the Communists pledged themselves in advance to remain silent in the face of the inevitable betrayals by the reformists, just as Stalin refused to criticize and break with the British trade-union leaders when they smashed the 1926 general strike. How little this has to do with Bolshevism can be appreciated by reading the original Comintern resolution on the united front:
"Imposing on themselves a discipline of action, it is obligatory that Communists should preserve for themselves, not only up to and after action, but if necessary even during action, the right and possibility of expressing their opinion on the policy of all working-class organizations without exception. The rejection of this condition is not permissible under any circumstances."
--"Theses on the United Front," 1922
The Soviet Union--A Degenerated Workers State
The definitive betrayal by Stalin in Germany, and the necessary conclusion of calling for new communist parties and a new international, led to the question of a new party inside the Soviet Union itself. This, in turn, brought up again the question of the class character of the Soviet state and the nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy which ruled it. Trotsky refused to consider the USSR "state capitalist" as did many former Communists who had been expelled by Stalin. To do so would imply that there could be a peaceful counterrevolution, "running the film of reformism in reverse," so to speak. Fundamentally the state is based on the property forms, which represent the interests of particular classes. The socialist property relations in the Soviet Union remained intact, and this colossal conquest of the October Revolution must not be lightly abandoned. While opposing the bureaucratic Stalinist leadership, Bolshevik-Leninists must unconditionally defend the USSR from imperialist attack.
At the same time, this was no healthy workers state. The proletariat had been politically expropriated. The soviets were simply administrative bodies to rubber-stamp the decisions of the General Secretary. The Bolshevik party was a creature of the bureaucracy, with the entire leadership of 1917 expelled or in disfavor, with the sole exception of Stalin. Given the events of recent years--the expulsions, the arrests and exiling of every oppositionist--it was criminal lightmindedness to believe that this parasitic bureaucracy could be eliminated without revolution. This would not be a social revolution, resulting in new property forms but a political revolution. The USSR was a degenerated workers state:
"...the privileges of the bureaucracy by themselves do not change the bases of the Soviet society, because the bureaucracy derives its privileges not from any special property relations peculiar to it as a 'class,' but from those property relations that have been .created by the October Revolution and that are fundamentally adequate for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
"To put it plainly, insofar as the bureaucracy robs the people (arid this is done in various ways by every bureaucracy), we have to deal not with class exploitation, in the scientific sense of the word, but with social parasitism, although on a very large scale....
"Finally, we may add for the sake of complete clarity: if in the USSR today the Marxist party were in power, it would renovate the entire political regime; it would shuffle and purge the bureaucracy and place it under the control of the masses--it would transform all of the administrative practices and inaugurate a series of capital reforms in the management of economy; but in no case would it have to undertake an overturn in the property relations, i.e., a new social revolution."
--"The Class Nature of the Soviet State," October 1933
The Stalinists immediately screamed "counterrevolution." Trotsky was an agent of Chamberlain, Hitler, the Mikado, etc., and was out to re-establish capitalism, they claimed. But the Stalinists were never able to point to a single instance in which Trotsky refused to support the USSR against imperialism or called for abandoning the socialist property forms. In 1939 on the eve of the Second World War he led a bitter struggle against a group in the American Socialist Workers Party, led by Max Shachtman, which refused to defend Russia against Hitler. Trotsky repeatedly emphasized that as long as the Soviet Union remained a workers state, however badly degenerated, it was a matter of principle to defend it. In the hour of need the Bolshevik-Leninists would stand ready at their battle posts.
In the early 1960's Mao Tse-tung announced that the Khrushchev-Brezhnev leadership of the Soviet Union since 1956 was "social-imperialist," and that the USSR is no longer a workers state but a new imperialism presided over by a "red bourgeoisie." In a recent attack on Trotskyism from a Maoist viewpoint, the pamphlet entitled "From Trotskyism to Social-Imperialism" by Michael Miller of the League for Proletarian Revolution, this position stands in contrast to Trotsky's position:
"In 1956 Khrushchev came on the scene, launching an attack on the dictatorship of the proletariat and spreading petty- bourgeois ideology and culture everywhere....
"Trotskyism has never understood in theory and never learned from practice the class character of the Soviet and Chinese states. During the period of Soviet history when the economic base was being transformed from private to social ownership of the means of production, the Trotskyites always stressed the political structure--the superstructure....The economic base can never be considered apart from the political structure. In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, which is the heart of the political structure, was taken over by a clique of bourgeois-type politicians and transformed into a variant of a big bourgeois political party. Now they are busy implementing economic policies which reverse the socialist economic base, which restore private ownership, private production for the market, and which reproduce on an enormous scale all the corresponding capitalist social relationships."
This passage demonstrates the Maoists' rejection of elementary Marxism. If, as they hold, a peaceful social counterrevolution took place in Russia, then logically a peaceful socialist revolution against capitalism is also possible--a classical social-democratic position which Lenin refuted in State and Revolution. Further, to maintain that such a revolution was accomplished by the appearance of a ruling group with "petty-bourgeois ideology" is idealism, completely counterposed to the Marxist materialist understanding that a social revolution can be accomplished only by an overturn in property relations.
Most important of all are the practical consequences of this policy. Since the USSR is an "imperialist" state according to Mao, it is not necessary to defend it against other capitalist states. In fact, Mao has gone so far as to press for a Sino-Japanese alliance against the Soviet Union and to encourage the retention of NATO as a bulwark against "Soviet imperialism" in Europe! These are the counterrevolutionary implications of the "state capitalist" position put into practice. They raise the specter of an inter-imperialist war with the USSR and China aligned with opposing capitalist powers--an eventuality which would place the socialist property forms of the deformed workers states in immediate danger. Though the Brezhnev clique in Moscow is not so explicit in blocking with capitalist states against China, its willingness to abandon the defense of the workers states in the hopes of achieving an alliance with U.S. imperialism was clearly revealed last year when Nixon was invited to sign a declaration of "peaceful coexistence" in Moscow at the very moment that American planes were carrying out saturation bombing over North Vietnam!
The Trotskyists, in contrast, call for Sino-Soviet unity against imperialism, for unconditional defense of the deformed workers states. At the same time we mercilessly criticize the parasitic bureaucracies who are sabotaging that defense. The advanced workers will recognize the justice of this principled, class position, and reject those such as the Maoists and pro-Moscow Stalinists who criminally abandon the defense of the workers' conquests.
When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973-Carl Davidson's "Left in Form,Right in Essence:The two-stage revolution"
Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
********
Carl Davidson's "Left in Form,Right in Essence:The two-stage revolution"
Trotsky’s last stand in his battle against the Comintern, while he was still within its ranks, was on the question of the Chinese revolution.
Today his contemporary followers stand in opposition to China’s path of socialist developmnent and its contribution to the strategy of world revolution.
What is the connection between the two?
The heart of the Trotskyist position on the Chinese revolution lies in its failure to grasp the essence of the revolution’s first stage as a bourgeois-democratic revolution combining the agrarian struggle against feudalism with the national liberation struggle against foreign imperialism.
China in the 1920s was a vast semi-colonial and semi-feudal country. Its population was overwhelmingly comprised of rural peasants under the yoke of a large feudal landholding class. The nation was disunited, torn apart by warlord rivalries throughout the country, and through competing imperialist powers dominating and looting its various coastal cities.
The Chinese industrial proletariat was small hut militant, concentrated in a few urban centers. The bourgeoisie was weak and divided. Its most powerful sector was a class of compradors or “bureaucrat capitalists” integrated with colonial interests and linked to feudal forces. In between there was a more numerous national or “middle” bourgeoisie, itself hemmed in by the feudal warlords and foreign capital, but exploiters of the workers and peasants nonetheless. At the other end was also a large urban petty bourgeoisie, comprised of many diverse strata.
Friends and enemies
This is a brief summary of a more detailed picture of China drawn by Mao Tsetung in his 1926 essay, Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society. Mao wrote the work in order to answer the question he posed as of “the first importance for the revolution: Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?” He answered in the following way:
Our enemies are all those in league with imperialism-the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat (the peasant masses) and petty bourgeoisie. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right wing may become our enemy and their left wing may become our friend – but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks.
Trotsky completely opposed this position, which was essentially the same as that of the Comintern’s call during the 1920s for a revolutionary “bloc of four classes” in China. The “bloc” was seen as a national united front of the workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie. The spearhead of the struggle was to be aimed at foreign imperialism. Its leading force was to be the proletariat and its motive force was to be the agrarian revolution of the peasant masses against the feudal landlords.
Politically, the bloc took the form of an alliance between the Communist party and the Kuomintang (KMT), which was at that time waging a massive armed struggle against feudal and imperialist forces. The CP joined its ranks, following the guidance of the 1923 Third Congress of the Comintern, led by Lenin, to “push the Kuomintang leftward.” While members of the KMT and its armies, however, the CP was to maintain its political and organizational independence in order to bring into effect the leading role of the working class within the united front. While the KMT was comprised of all classes, it represented the interests of the national bourgeoisie. initially under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen and later of Chiang Kai-shek.
Trotsky considered the “bloc of four classes” counter-revolutionary and a manifestation of “Menshevism” imposed in China by Stalin. In his view the struggle had to be spearheaded against the bourgeoisie as a whole. At the same time, he played down or dismissed entirely the feudal and imperialist targets of the revolution.
“No landlords”
“There is almost no estate of landlords in China,” Trotsky wrote in a ludicrous passage in his 1929 work, The Permanent Revolution. “The landowners are much more intimately bound up with the capitalists than in Tsarist Russia, and the specific weight of the agrarian question is therefore much lighter than in Tsarist Russia.”
Stalin, in a reply to Trotsky at a 1927 meeting of the Comintern, noted the vast and elemental upsurge of the peasants against the feudal landlords and asked:
Where does the agrarian revolution in China, with its demand for the confiscation of the landlords’ land, come from? ... Surely, the agrarian revolution cannot have dropped from the skies?
Trotsky practically liquidated the agrarian content of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and limited its scope mainly to the interests of the national bourgeoisie. “The Chinese revolution,” he states in The Chinese Revolution and the Theses of Comrade Stalin, “has a national bourgeois character principally because the development of the productive forces of Chinese capitalism collideE with its governmental customs dependence upon the countries of imperialism.”
“The revolution in China,” Stalin answered Trotsky ironically, “is primarily, so to speak, an anti-customs revolution ...”
“Permit me to observe,” he continued, “that this is the viewpoint of a state counselor of His Highness’ Chang Tso-lin (China’s self- proclaimed emperor.)”
If Trotsky’s viewpoint is correct, then it must be admitted that Chang Tso-lin and Chiang Kaishek are right in not desiring either an agrarian or a workers’ revolution and in striving only for the abolition of the unequal treaties and the establishment of customs autonomy for China.
Rightist in essence
Thus through its “left” form of opposition to the national united front during the anti-feudal and anti-imperialist stage of the revolution, Trotsky’s viewpoint is revealed to be rightist in its essence.
How were these questions reflected in the actual practice of the Chinese revolution? The Trotskyists have claimed that Chiang Kai-shek’s betrayal of the united front and massacre of Communists in 1927 conclusively demonstrated the “counter-revolutionary” character of the Comintern line at the time as well as Mao’s line as it is still being developed and applied today.
The Chinese Communist party believes that its line was correct during “the early and middle stages of the 1924-27 period and was summed up by Mao in his Analysis of Classes ... Toward the end, however, as Chiang Kai-shek shifted increasingly to the right and the national bourgeoisie, in the main, deserted the revolution, the party’s line came to be dominated by the right opportunist policies of Chen Tu-hsiu, the CPC’s general secretary.
In the face of the KMT’s efforts to subordinate the CPC, spurred on by the growing fear of the worker and peasant upsurge within the KMT leadership, Chen Tu-hsiu pursued a policy of “all alliance and no struggle” within the united front, thus liquidating the proletariat’s leading role. (he also feared the peasant risings, believing they had “gone too far” and that they were a “conservative” force “unlikely to join the revolution.” In practice this meant capitulation to the betrayal of Chiang Kai-shek.
“Left” opposition to peasants
At the same time a second deviation arose in the CPC, the “left” opportunist line of Chang Kuo-tao, aimed at “all struggle and no alliance.” While Chen Tu-hsiu only curried favor with the KMT and discounted the peasants. Chang Kuotao urged reliance “only on the labor movement” and likewise discounted the peasants.
Opposed to what was identical in both the right and “left” opportunist lines was Mao Tsetung, who organized and supported the agrarian revolts, stating that “without the poor peasants there would be no revolution.” Mao’s policy on the united front throughout the Chinese revolution was one of both “unite with and struggle against,” always maintaining the independence of the CPC, its leading role among the masses and its armed power.
Mao’s position did not win hegemony at the time. “In 1927 Chen Tu-hsiu’s capitulationism,” Mao wrote later in 1937, “led to the failure of the revolution. No member of our party should ever forget this historical lesson written in blood.”
Which tendency was most represented by the general line of the Comintern? “I know that there are Kuomintangists and even Chinese Communists,” Stalin stated in 1926, “who do not consider it possible to unleash revolution in the countryside, since they fear that if the peasantry were drawn into the revolution it would disrupt the united anti-imperialist front. That is a profound error, comrades. The more quickly and thoroughly the Chinese peasantry is drawn into the revolution, the stronger and more powerful the anti-imperialist front in China will be.”
For as much as a year prior to Chiang Kaishek’s 1927 coup, the Comintern had urged and warned the Chinese CP to work for the “resignation or expulsion of Rights from the Kuomintang.” Six weeks prior to the coup, it stated, “It is necessary to adopt the course of arming the workers and peasants and converting the peasant committees in the localities into actual organs of governmental authority equipped with armed self-defense ... The Communist party must not come forward as a brake on the mass movement; the Communist i arty should not cover up the treacherous and reactionary policy of the Kuomintang Rights, and should mobilize the masses around the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist party on the basis of exposing the Rights.”
In the main, the Comintern advocated a policy put into practice independently by Mao and ignored or opposed by both Chen Tu-hsiu and Chang Kuo-tao. There were also a number of mistakes, some of which were corrected and others which had more serious consequences. Most significant was the role of Borodin, a key Comintern advisor in China at the time who vacillated on carrying out the Comintern line and took a number of positions close to Chen Tu-hsiu.
If Trotsky’s line can be said to have had anything in common with Chinese reality, however, it was closest to the “left” opportunism of Chang Kuo-tao. Trotsky later saw in Chiang Kai-shek’s coup the “completion” of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the onset of new period of “stabilization” in China. What actually transpired was a prolonged period of renewed crisis, civil war and “dual power” in the form of liberated bases in the countryside. Trotsky’s line here, which called for a “constituent assembly” and legal struggle for democratic rights, was thoroughly rightist and devoid of any connection with the actual course of class struggle.
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
********
Carl Davidson's "Left in Form,Right in Essence:The two-stage revolution"
Trotsky’s last stand in his battle against the Comintern, while he was still within its ranks, was on the question of the Chinese revolution.
Today his contemporary followers stand in opposition to China’s path of socialist developmnent and its contribution to the strategy of world revolution.
What is the connection between the two?
The heart of the Trotskyist position on the Chinese revolution lies in its failure to grasp the essence of the revolution’s first stage as a bourgeois-democratic revolution combining the agrarian struggle against feudalism with the national liberation struggle against foreign imperialism.
China in the 1920s was a vast semi-colonial and semi-feudal country. Its population was overwhelmingly comprised of rural peasants under the yoke of a large feudal landholding class. The nation was disunited, torn apart by warlord rivalries throughout the country, and through competing imperialist powers dominating and looting its various coastal cities.
The Chinese industrial proletariat was small hut militant, concentrated in a few urban centers. The bourgeoisie was weak and divided. Its most powerful sector was a class of compradors or “bureaucrat capitalists” integrated with colonial interests and linked to feudal forces. In between there was a more numerous national or “middle” bourgeoisie, itself hemmed in by the feudal warlords and foreign capital, but exploiters of the workers and peasants nonetheless. At the other end was also a large urban petty bourgeoisie, comprised of many diverse strata.
Friends and enemies
This is a brief summary of a more detailed picture of China drawn by Mao Tsetung in his 1926 essay, Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society. Mao wrote the work in order to answer the question he posed as of “the first importance for the revolution: Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?” He answered in the following way:
Our enemies are all those in league with imperialism-the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat (the peasant masses) and petty bourgeoisie. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right wing may become our enemy and their left wing may become our friend – but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks.
Trotsky completely opposed this position, which was essentially the same as that of the Comintern’s call during the 1920s for a revolutionary “bloc of four classes” in China. The “bloc” was seen as a national united front of the workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie. The spearhead of the struggle was to be aimed at foreign imperialism. Its leading force was to be the proletariat and its motive force was to be the agrarian revolution of the peasant masses against the feudal landlords.
Politically, the bloc took the form of an alliance between the Communist party and the Kuomintang (KMT), which was at that time waging a massive armed struggle against feudal and imperialist forces. The CP joined its ranks, following the guidance of the 1923 Third Congress of the Comintern, led by Lenin, to “push the Kuomintang leftward.” While members of the KMT and its armies, however, the CP was to maintain its political and organizational independence in order to bring into effect the leading role of the working class within the united front. While the KMT was comprised of all classes, it represented the interests of the national bourgeoisie. initially under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen and later of Chiang Kai-shek.
Trotsky considered the “bloc of four classes” counter-revolutionary and a manifestation of “Menshevism” imposed in China by Stalin. In his view the struggle had to be spearheaded against the bourgeoisie as a whole. At the same time, he played down or dismissed entirely the feudal and imperialist targets of the revolution.
“No landlords”
“There is almost no estate of landlords in China,” Trotsky wrote in a ludicrous passage in his 1929 work, The Permanent Revolution. “The landowners are much more intimately bound up with the capitalists than in Tsarist Russia, and the specific weight of the agrarian question is therefore much lighter than in Tsarist Russia.”
Stalin, in a reply to Trotsky at a 1927 meeting of the Comintern, noted the vast and elemental upsurge of the peasants against the feudal landlords and asked:
Where does the agrarian revolution in China, with its demand for the confiscation of the landlords’ land, come from? ... Surely, the agrarian revolution cannot have dropped from the skies?
Trotsky practically liquidated the agrarian content of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and limited its scope mainly to the interests of the national bourgeoisie. “The Chinese revolution,” he states in The Chinese Revolution and the Theses of Comrade Stalin, “has a national bourgeois character principally because the development of the productive forces of Chinese capitalism collideE with its governmental customs dependence upon the countries of imperialism.”
“The revolution in China,” Stalin answered Trotsky ironically, “is primarily, so to speak, an anti-customs revolution ...”
“Permit me to observe,” he continued, “that this is the viewpoint of a state counselor of His Highness’ Chang Tso-lin (China’s self- proclaimed emperor.)”
If Trotsky’s viewpoint is correct, then it must be admitted that Chang Tso-lin and Chiang Kaishek are right in not desiring either an agrarian or a workers’ revolution and in striving only for the abolition of the unequal treaties and the establishment of customs autonomy for China.
Rightist in essence
Thus through its “left” form of opposition to the national united front during the anti-feudal and anti-imperialist stage of the revolution, Trotsky’s viewpoint is revealed to be rightist in its essence.
How were these questions reflected in the actual practice of the Chinese revolution? The Trotskyists have claimed that Chiang Kai-shek’s betrayal of the united front and massacre of Communists in 1927 conclusively demonstrated the “counter-revolutionary” character of the Comintern line at the time as well as Mao’s line as it is still being developed and applied today.
The Chinese Communist party believes that its line was correct during “the early and middle stages of the 1924-27 period and was summed up by Mao in his Analysis of Classes ... Toward the end, however, as Chiang Kai-shek shifted increasingly to the right and the national bourgeoisie, in the main, deserted the revolution, the party’s line came to be dominated by the right opportunist policies of Chen Tu-hsiu, the CPC’s general secretary.
In the face of the KMT’s efforts to subordinate the CPC, spurred on by the growing fear of the worker and peasant upsurge within the KMT leadership, Chen Tu-hsiu pursued a policy of “all alliance and no struggle” within the united front, thus liquidating the proletariat’s leading role. (he also feared the peasant risings, believing they had “gone too far” and that they were a “conservative” force “unlikely to join the revolution.” In practice this meant capitulation to the betrayal of Chiang Kai-shek.
“Left” opposition to peasants
At the same time a second deviation arose in the CPC, the “left” opportunist line of Chang Kuo-tao, aimed at “all struggle and no alliance.” While Chen Tu-hsiu only curried favor with the KMT and discounted the peasants. Chang Kuotao urged reliance “only on the labor movement” and likewise discounted the peasants.
Opposed to what was identical in both the right and “left” opportunist lines was Mao Tsetung, who organized and supported the agrarian revolts, stating that “without the poor peasants there would be no revolution.” Mao’s policy on the united front throughout the Chinese revolution was one of both “unite with and struggle against,” always maintaining the independence of the CPC, its leading role among the masses and its armed power.
Mao’s position did not win hegemony at the time. “In 1927 Chen Tu-hsiu’s capitulationism,” Mao wrote later in 1937, “led to the failure of the revolution. No member of our party should ever forget this historical lesson written in blood.”
Which tendency was most represented by the general line of the Comintern? “I know that there are Kuomintangists and even Chinese Communists,” Stalin stated in 1926, “who do not consider it possible to unleash revolution in the countryside, since they fear that if the peasantry were drawn into the revolution it would disrupt the united anti-imperialist front. That is a profound error, comrades. The more quickly and thoroughly the Chinese peasantry is drawn into the revolution, the stronger and more powerful the anti-imperialist front in China will be.”
For as much as a year prior to Chiang Kaishek’s 1927 coup, the Comintern had urged and warned the Chinese CP to work for the “resignation or expulsion of Rights from the Kuomintang.” Six weeks prior to the coup, it stated, “It is necessary to adopt the course of arming the workers and peasants and converting the peasant committees in the localities into actual organs of governmental authority equipped with armed self-defense ... The Communist party must not come forward as a brake on the mass movement; the Communist i arty should not cover up the treacherous and reactionary policy of the Kuomintang Rights, and should mobilize the masses around the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist party on the basis of exposing the Rights.”
In the main, the Comintern advocated a policy put into practice independently by Mao and ignored or opposed by both Chen Tu-hsiu and Chang Kuo-tao. There were also a number of mistakes, some of which were corrected and others which had more serious consequences. Most significant was the role of Borodin, a key Comintern advisor in China at the time who vacillated on carrying out the Comintern line and took a number of positions close to Chen Tu-hsiu.
If Trotsky’s line can be said to have had anything in common with Chinese reality, however, it was closest to the “left” opportunism of Chang Kuo-tao. Trotsky later saw in Chiang Kai-shek’s coup the “completion” of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the onset of new period of “stabilization” in China. What actually transpired was a prolonged period of renewed crisis, civil war and “dual power” in the form of liberated bases in the countryside. Trotsky’s line here, which called for a “constituent assembly” and legal struggle for democratic rights, was thoroughly rightist and devoid of any connection with the actual course of class struggle.
Some Times You Have To Think Outside The Box-The Current State Of The Struggle Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions And Strategy- A Short Note
Markin comment:
This short note is animated by the news, reported via the Steve Lendman Blog (June 15, 2011, see below) that the Wisconsin Supreme Court has, in essence, upheld Governor Walker’s anti-union collective bargaining guttering bill that was the cause of much union struggle in that state earlier this year. It is, as well, animated by a plethora of e-mail requests from Daily Kos to support (in cyberspace of course)the efforts of Wisconsinites to recall various Republican state senators in order, presumably, to reverse that Republican majority's previous passage of the anti-union bill. And, for good measure, the note is animated by some archival work that I am doing concerning the slogan calling for labor anti-war general strikes during the Vietnam War, although that slogan is not directly related just now to the struggle in Wisconsin.
The question posed in the headline, the idea of thinking politically outside the box, was not devised merely for rhetorical propagandistic effect but rather to raise the point that, as mentioned in the paragraph above, communists, labor militants, and their supporters are not confined to the niceties of bourgeois institutional solutions in order gain redress of grievances. The use of the bourgeois courts and electioneering systems, while, perhaps useful, and occasionally successful (think of the gay marriage issues in recent times) is not always the way to win in the class struggle. And unless something happens in the tedious recall process to dramatically change things in Wisconsin (and elsewhere) the public workers in Wisconsin, and don’t kid yourself, unionized workers in general have suffered a serious defeat despite their, at times, heroic militancy last winter.
And that is where the third prong of this note comes into play. I am by no means, like some wild-eyed youthful anarchist, a devotee of labor-centered general strikes every day in every way as some automatic path to socialist revolution. Nor am I, like some trade union bureaucrat in France, for example, for using such a tactic to “blow off steam” when the class struggle heats up. In short, I am not for raising this slogan haphazardly but in February in Wisconsin this call made perfect sense. Perfect sense in order to solidify the entire labor movement in Wisconsin (and elsewhere) behind their fellow unionists when they were “under the gun,” at a time when there was moreover sentiment on the ground for such action. And, also, thinking offensively, to “bloody” the Walker-ite and tea bag opposition in the shell, as well.
Of course on June 20, 2011 the ebb and flow of the class struggle in Wisconsin would make raising that slogan now, to say the least, untimely. The real deal, the lesson to be learned, is that we cannot afford to limit our tactics to the norms of bourgeois politics-they know those politics better than we do and have state power to boot. What we have going for us are our numbers, our solidarity, our capacity to struggle and some labor history from the 1930s and 1940s concerning successful union actions that we had best dust off.
Note: I have used the information provided in the Steve Lendman Blog, and gladly, on many occasions especially for current news. His prolific output reflects his sense of urgency in the task of citizen journalist that he apparently has for set himself. I, on the other hand, am unabashedly a communist propagandist and on this occasion need to draw some conclusions from the struggle in Wisconsin and fear not to say words like class struggle, socialism , socialist revolution and labor general strikes absent from his blog, his thinking and from the general American political landscape.
*******
Wisconsin Supreme Court Reinstates Anti-Union Law - by Stephen Lendman
Wisconsin Supreme Court Reinstates Anti-Union Law
by Stephen Lendman
Email: lendmanstephen (nospam) sbcglobal.net (verified) 15 Jun 2011
union busting
Wisconsin Supreme Court Reinstates Anti-Union Law - by Stephen Lendman
At the state and federal levels, pro-business/anti-worker rulings are nothing new. US Supreme Court history is rife with them since the 19th century, and no wonder.
From inception, America was always ruled by men, not laws, who lie, connive, misinterpret, and pretty much do what they please for their own self-interest.
In 1787 in Philadelphia, "the people" who mattered most were elitists. America's revolution substituted new management for old. Everything changed but stayed the same under a system establishing illusory democracy at the federal, state and local levels.
Today, all three branches of government prove it's more corrupt, ruthless, and indifferent to fundamental freedoms and human needs than ever, including worker rights to bargain collectively with management on equal terms. Forget it. They're going, going, gone.
Last March, a protracted Senate battle ended when hard-line Republicans violated Wisconsin's open meetings law, requiring 24 hours prior notice for special sessions unless giving it is impossible or impractical.
The epic battle ended along party lines after State Assembly members past Walker's bill 53 - 42, following the Senate voting 18 - 1 with no debate.
At issue was passing an old-fashioned union-busting law with no Democrats present, brazen politicians and corrupted union bosses selling out rank and file members for self-enrichement and privilege, complicit with corporate CEOs.
Besides other draconian provisions, the measure permits collective bargaining only on wage issues before ending them altogether, what's ahead unless stopped.
On May 27, however, Circuit Court Judge Maryann Sumi rescinded Walker's bill, ruling Republican lawmakers violated the state's open meetings law. They promptly appealed to Wisconsin's Supreme Court, needing a decision before June 30, the 2011 - 2013 budget deadline.
Republicans, in fact, warned that without prompt resolution they'd include anti-worker provisions in their budget bill, practically daring the High Court not to accommodate them.
Unsurprisingly, they obliged, reinstating Republican Governor Scott Walker's union-busting measure, clearing the way ahead to strip public employees of all rights, heading them like all US workers for neo-serfdom without collective national action to stop it.
On June 14, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writers Patrick Marley and Don Walker headlined, "Supreme Court reinstates collective bargaining law," saying:
"Acting with unusual speed, the (Court) Tuesday ordered the reinstatement of (Walker's) controversial plan to end most collective bargaining (rights) for tens of thousands of public workers," in clear violation of state law.
Nonetheless, ruling 4 - 3, the Supreme Court said lawmakers were "not subject to the state's open meetings law, and so did not violate that law when it hastily" acted in March.
Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson disagreed, rebuking her colleagues for judicial errors and faulty judgment in a stinging dissent, saying:
The Court unjustifiably "reached a predetermined conclusion not based on the fact(s) and the law, which undermines the majority's ultimate decision."
Majority justices, in fact, "make their own findings of fact, mischaracterize the parties' arguments, misinterpret statutes, minimize (if not eliminate) Wisconsin constitutional guarantees, and misstate case law, appearing to silently overrule case law dating back to at least 1891."
Republicans praised the decision. Democrats said they'd move to amend the state constitution to assure meetings law enforcement, what could take years and only be possible if they have majority powers.
The measure will take effect once Secretary of State Doug La Follette publishes it, what he's certain to do quickly.
The ruling was similar to an Illinois January 27 one when its Supreme Court ruled Rahm Emanuel could run for mayor despite his residence ineligibility according to binding state law since 1818, the year Illinois gained statehood.
The law says only qualified voters who "resided in the municipality at least one year preceding the election or appointment" are eligible to run for office. Although Emanuel didn't qualify, the High Court ruled for him anyway, proving it's not the law that counts (in Illinois, Wisconsin or anywhere in America), it's enough clout to subvert it.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
This short note is animated by the news, reported via the Steve Lendman Blog (June 15, 2011, see below) that the Wisconsin Supreme Court has, in essence, upheld Governor Walker’s anti-union collective bargaining guttering bill that was the cause of much union struggle in that state earlier this year. It is, as well, animated by a plethora of e-mail requests from Daily Kos to support (in cyberspace of course)the efforts of Wisconsinites to recall various Republican state senators in order, presumably, to reverse that Republican majority's previous passage of the anti-union bill. And, for good measure, the note is animated by some archival work that I am doing concerning the slogan calling for labor anti-war general strikes during the Vietnam War, although that slogan is not directly related just now to the struggle in Wisconsin.
The question posed in the headline, the idea of thinking politically outside the box, was not devised merely for rhetorical propagandistic effect but rather to raise the point that, as mentioned in the paragraph above, communists, labor militants, and their supporters are not confined to the niceties of bourgeois institutional solutions in order gain redress of grievances. The use of the bourgeois courts and electioneering systems, while, perhaps useful, and occasionally successful (think of the gay marriage issues in recent times) is not always the way to win in the class struggle. And unless something happens in the tedious recall process to dramatically change things in Wisconsin (and elsewhere) the public workers in Wisconsin, and don’t kid yourself, unionized workers in general have suffered a serious defeat despite their, at times, heroic militancy last winter.
And that is where the third prong of this note comes into play. I am by no means, like some wild-eyed youthful anarchist, a devotee of labor-centered general strikes every day in every way as some automatic path to socialist revolution. Nor am I, like some trade union bureaucrat in France, for example, for using such a tactic to “blow off steam” when the class struggle heats up. In short, I am not for raising this slogan haphazardly but in February in Wisconsin this call made perfect sense. Perfect sense in order to solidify the entire labor movement in Wisconsin (and elsewhere) behind their fellow unionists when they were “under the gun,” at a time when there was moreover sentiment on the ground for such action. And, also, thinking offensively, to “bloody” the Walker-ite and tea bag opposition in the shell, as well.
Of course on June 20, 2011 the ebb and flow of the class struggle in Wisconsin would make raising that slogan now, to say the least, untimely. The real deal, the lesson to be learned, is that we cannot afford to limit our tactics to the norms of bourgeois politics-they know those politics better than we do and have state power to boot. What we have going for us are our numbers, our solidarity, our capacity to struggle and some labor history from the 1930s and 1940s concerning successful union actions that we had best dust off.
Note: I have used the information provided in the Steve Lendman Blog, and gladly, on many occasions especially for current news. His prolific output reflects his sense of urgency in the task of citizen journalist that he apparently has for set himself. I, on the other hand, am unabashedly a communist propagandist and on this occasion need to draw some conclusions from the struggle in Wisconsin and fear not to say words like class struggle, socialism , socialist revolution and labor general strikes absent from his blog, his thinking and from the general American political landscape.
*******
Wisconsin Supreme Court Reinstates Anti-Union Law - by Stephen Lendman
Wisconsin Supreme Court Reinstates Anti-Union Law
by Stephen Lendman
Email: lendmanstephen (nospam) sbcglobal.net (verified) 15 Jun 2011
union busting
Wisconsin Supreme Court Reinstates Anti-Union Law - by Stephen Lendman
At the state and federal levels, pro-business/anti-worker rulings are nothing new. US Supreme Court history is rife with them since the 19th century, and no wonder.
From inception, America was always ruled by men, not laws, who lie, connive, misinterpret, and pretty much do what they please for their own self-interest.
In 1787 in Philadelphia, "the people" who mattered most were elitists. America's revolution substituted new management for old. Everything changed but stayed the same under a system establishing illusory democracy at the federal, state and local levels.
Today, all three branches of government prove it's more corrupt, ruthless, and indifferent to fundamental freedoms and human needs than ever, including worker rights to bargain collectively with management on equal terms. Forget it. They're going, going, gone.
Last March, a protracted Senate battle ended when hard-line Republicans violated Wisconsin's open meetings law, requiring 24 hours prior notice for special sessions unless giving it is impossible or impractical.
The epic battle ended along party lines after State Assembly members past Walker's bill 53 - 42, following the Senate voting 18 - 1 with no debate.
At issue was passing an old-fashioned union-busting law with no Democrats present, brazen politicians and corrupted union bosses selling out rank and file members for self-enrichement and privilege, complicit with corporate CEOs.
Besides other draconian provisions, the measure permits collective bargaining only on wage issues before ending them altogether, what's ahead unless stopped.
On May 27, however, Circuit Court Judge Maryann Sumi rescinded Walker's bill, ruling Republican lawmakers violated the state's open meetings law. They promptly appealed to Wisconsin's Supreme Court, needing a decision before June 30, the 2011 - 2013 budget deadline.
Republicans, in fact, warned that without prompt resolution they'd include anti-worker provisions in their budget bill, practically daring the High Court not to accommodate them.
Unsurprisingly, they obliged, reinstating Republican Governor Scott Walker's union-busting measure, clearing the way ahead to strip public employees of all rights, heading them like all US workers for neo-serfdom without collective national action to stop it.
On June 14, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writers Patrick Marley and Don Walker headlined, "Supreme Court reinstates collective bargaining law," saying:
"Acting with unusual speed, the (Court) Tuesday ordered the reinstatement of (Walker's) controversial plan to end most collective bargaining (rights) for tens of thousands of public workers," in clear violation of state law.
Nonetheless, ruling 4 - 3, the Supreme Court said lawmakers were "not subject to the state's open meetings law, and so did not violate that law when it hastily" acted in March.
Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson disagreed, rebuking her colleagues for judicial errors and faulty judgment in a stinging dissent, saying:
The Court unjustifiably "reached a predetermined conclusion not based on the fact(s) and the law, which undermines the majority's ultimate decision."
Majority justices, in fact, "make their own findings of fact, mischaracterize the parties' arguments, misinterpret statutes, minimize (if not eliminate) Wisconsin constitutional guarantees, and misstate case law, appearing to silently overrule case law dating back to at least 1891."
Republicans praised the decision. Democrats said they'd move to amend the state constitution to assure meetings law enforcement, what could take years and only be possible if they have majority powers.
The measure will take effect once Secretary of State Doug La Follette publishes it, what he's certain to do quickly.
The ruling was similar to an Illinois January 27 one when its Supreme Court ruled Rahm Emanuel could run for mayor despite his residence ineligibility according to binding state law since 1818, the year Illinois gained statehood.
The law says only qualified voters who "resided in the municipality at least one year preceding the election or appointment" are eligible to run for office. Although Emanuel didn't qualify, the High Court ruled for him anyway, proving it's not the law that counts (in Illinois, Wisconsin or anywhere in America), it's enough clout to subvert it.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
***Where Have The Girls Gone- When Young Women’s Voices Ruled the Airwaves Before The British Rock Invasion, Circa 1964- Early Girls, Volume Five
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Chiffons performing their classic Tonight's The Night.
Early Girls, Volume Five, various singers, Ace Records, 2001
As I mentioned in a review of a two-volume set of, for lack of a better term, girl doo wop some of the songs which overlaps in this five-volume series, I have, of late, been running back over some rock material that formed my coming of age listening music (on that ubiquitous, and very personal, iPod, oops, battery-driven transistor radio that kept those snooping parents out in the dark, clueless, and that was just fine, agreed), and that of my generation, the generation of ’68. Naturally one had to pay homage to the blues influences from the likes of Muddy Waters, Big Mama Thornton, and Big Joe Turner. And, of course, the rockabilly influences from Elvis, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and Jerry Lee Lewis on. Additionally, I have spent some time on the male side of the doo wop be-bop Saturday night led by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers on Why Do Fools Fall In Love? (good question, right). I noted there that I had not done much with the female side of the doo wop night, the great ‘girl’ groups that had their heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s before the British invasion, among other things, changed our tastes in popular music. I would expand that observation here to include girls’ voices generally. As there, I make some amends for that omission here.
As I also noted in that earlier review one problem with the girl groups, and now with these generic girl vocals for a guy, me, a serious rock guy, me, was that the lyrics for many of the girl group songs, frankly, did not “speak to me.” After all how much empathy could a young ragamuffin of boy brought up on the wrong side of the tracks like this writer have for a girl who breaks a guy's heart after leading him on, yes, leading him on, just because her big bruiser of a boyfriend is coming back and she needs some excuse to brush the heartbroken lad off in the Angels' My Boyfriend’s Back. Or some lucky guy, some lucky Sunday guy, maybe, who breathlessly catches the eye of the singer in the Shirelles' I Met Him On Sunday from a guy who, dateless Saturday night, was hunched over some misbegotten book, some study book, on Sunday feeling all dejected. And how about this, some two, or maybe, three-timing gal who berated her ever-loving boyfriend because she needs a good talking to, or worst, a now socially incorrect, very incorrect and rightly so, "beating" in Joanie Sommers’ Johnny Get Angry.
And reviewing the material in this volume gave me the same flash-back feeling I felt listening to the girl doo wop sounds. I will give similar examples of that teen boy alienation for this volume, and this approach will drive the reviews of all five of these volumes in the series. It Hurts To Be Sixteen by Andrea Carroll, but what about a guy, a sixteen year old guy; Blue Summer by The Royalettes, make mine blue summerwinterfallspring; Sneaky Sue by Patty Lace & Petticoats, give me a call Sue; Richie by Gloria Dennis, an unworthy guy for sure; Poor Little Puppet by Cathy Carroll, self-explanatory; Lonely Sixteen by Janie Black, ditto it hurts to be sixteen; Jimmy Boy by Carol Shaw, it's always jimmy boy, how about marky boy?; Be My Boy by The Paris Sisters, okay, just call; Kookie Little Paradise by Jo Ann Campbell, I'll settle for the beach, blanket or not; and, Tonight's The Night by The Chiffons, this one hurts to the core, the not tonight core. I might add here, as I did with volume four, that as we have with volume five gone well over the one hundred songs mark in this series not only have we worked over, and worked over hard, the “speak to” problem but have now run up against the limits of songs worthy of mention, mention at the time or fifty years later, your choice.
So you get the idea, this stuff could not “speak to me.” Now you understand, right? Except, surprise, surprise foolish, behind the eight- ball, know-nothing youthful guy had it all wrong and should have been listening, and listening like crazy, to these lyrics because, brothers and sisters, they held the key to what was what about what was on girls’ minds back in the day, and maybe now a little too, and if I could have decoded this I would have had, well, the beginning of knowledge, girl knowledge. Damn. But that is one of the virtues, and maybe the only virtue of age. Ya, and also get this- you had better get your do-lang, do-lang, your shoop, shoop, and your best be-bop, be-bop into that good night voice out and sing along to the lyrics here. This, fellow baby-boomers, was our teen angst, teen alienation, teen love youth and now this stuff sounds great.
Early Girls, Volume Five, various singers, Ace Records, 2001
As I mentioned in a review of a two-volume set of, for lack of a better term, girl doo wop some of the songs which overlaps in this five-volume series, I have, of late, been running back over some rock material that formed my coming of age listening music (on that ubiquitous, and very personal, iPod, oops, battery-driven transistor radio that kept those snooping parents out in the dark, clueless, and that was just fine, agreed), and that of my generation, the generation of ’68. Naturally one had to pay homage to the blues influences from the likes of Muddy Waters, Big Mama Thornton, and Big Joe Turner. And, of course, the rockabilly influences from Elvis, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and Jerry Lee Lewis on. Additionally, I have spent some time on the male side of the doo wop be-bop Saturday night led by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers on Why Do Fools Fall In Love? (good question, right). I noted there that I had not done much with the female side of the doo wop night, the great ‘girl’ groups that had their heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s before the British invasion, among other things, changed our tastes in popular music. I would expand that observation here to include girls’ voices generally. As there, I make some amends for that omission here.
As I also noted in that earlier review one problem with the girl groups, and now with these generic girl vocals for a guy, me, a serious rock guy, me, was that the lyrics for many of the girl group songs, frankly, did not “speak to me.” After all how much empathy could a young ragamuffin of boy brought up on the wrong side of the tracks like this writer have for a girl who breaks a guy's heart after leading him on, yes, leading him on, just because her big bruiser of a boyfriend is coming back and she needs some excuse to brush the heartbroken lad off in the Angels' My Boyfriend’s Back. Or some lucky guy, some lucky Sunday guy, maybe, who breathlessly catches the eye of the singer in the Shirelles' I Met Him On Sunday from a guy who, dateless Saturday night, was hunched over some misbegotten book, some study book, on Sunday feeling all dejected. And how about this, some two, or maybe, three-timing gal who berated her ever-loving boyfriend because she needs a good talking to, or worst, a now socially incorrect, very incorrect and rightly so, "beating" in Joanie Sommers’ Johnny Get Angry.
And reviewing the material in this volume gave me the same flash-back feeling I felt listening to the girl doo wop sounds. I will give similar examples of that teen boy alienation for this volume, and this approach will drive the reviews of all five of these volumes in the series. It Hurts To Be Sixteen by Andrea Carroll, but what about a guy, a sixteen year old guy; Blue Summer by The Royalettes, make mine blue summerwinterfallspring; Sneaky Sue by Patty Lace & Petticoats, give me a call Sue; Richie by Gloria Dennis, an unworthy guy for sure; Poor Little Puppet by Cathy Carroll, self-explanatory; Lonely Sixteen by Janie Black, ditto it hurts to be sixteen; Jimmy Boy by Carol Shaw, it's always jimmy boy, how about marky boy?; Be My Boy by The Paris Sisters, okay, just call; Kookie Little Paradise by Jo Ann Campbell, I'll settle for the beach, blanket or not; and, Tonight's The Night by The Chiffons, this one hurts to the core, the not tonight core. I might add here, as I did with volume four, that as we have with volume five gone well over the one hundred songs mark in this series not only have we worked over, and worked over hard, the “speak to” problem but have now run up against the limits of songs worthy of mention, mention at the time or fifty years later, your choice.
So you get the idea, this stuff could not “speak to me.” Now you understand, right? Except, surprise, surprise foolish, behind the eight- ball, know-nothing youthful guy had it all wrong and should have been listening, and listening like crazy, to these lyrics because, brothers and sisters, they held the key to what was what about what was on girls’ minds back in the day, and maybe now a little too, and if I could have decoded this I would have had, well, the beginning of knowledge, girl knowledge. Damn. But that is one of the virtues, and maybe the only virtue of age. Ya, and also get this- you had better get your do-lang, do-lang, your shoop, shoop, and your best be-bop, be-bop into that good night voice out and sing along to the lyrics here. This, fellow baby-boomers, was our teen angst, teen alienation, teen love youth and now this stuff sounds great.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
In Honor Of Julius And Ethel Rosenberg On The Anniversary Of Their Execution-On Paying Homage To Leftist (And Other) Political Opponents- A Short Note
A repost from June 19, 2010
Markin comment:
First question: What do the murdered heroic Kansas abortion provider, Doctor George Tiller, the 17th century Puritan revolutionary poet and propagandist, John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, and the early 20th century labor and civil rights lawyer, Clarence Darrow, defender of “Big” Big Haywood and John Scopes, among others, have in common? Similar expertise in similar fields? No. Common political vision? Hell, no. Could it be that they, each in their own way, contributed to the store of our human progress? Well, yes. And also, by the way, they have all been honored on this American Left History site for those contributions. And nary a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them.
Second question: What do the pre-World War II American communist renegade from Marxism, Max Shachtman, the old English socialist and novelist turned British imperial informer, George Orwell, and the German “pope” of pre- World War I Marxism in the Second International , Karl Kautsky have in common? I will not prolong the agony on this one because I have to make my point before the next millennium so it is that they have made contributions to our common socialist movement before they went over to the other, pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist side (one way or the other). And also, by the way, they have all been honored on this American Left History site for those contributions. And nary a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them.
Third question: What do the old-fashioned 19th century French revolutionary and Paris Commune member, Louis–August Blanqui, the iconic American black liberation fighter, Malcolm X, and the old Industrial Workers of World (IWW-Wobblies) organizer extraordinaire, Vincent St. John, have in common? Again, I will cut to the chase; they were all, one way or the other, political opponents of Marxism. And also, by the way, they have all been honored on this American Left History site for those contributions. And nary a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them.
Okay, by my count I see zero legendary Bolshevik names listed above. Names like Leon Trotsky, V.I. Lenin, N. Krupskaya, J. Sverdlov, Jim Cannon, John Reed, “Big” Bill Haywood, and so on. Oh, they have been honored in this space, profusely. Of course. (Although I do not believe that there was a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them either, that was pure bourgeosi propaganda, always). And that is exactly my point here.
Let me back track on this one, a little. Recently I did a series of reviews of the work of American detective fiction writer, Dashiell Hammett. (see blogs, dated August 15-18, 2010). Beyond a review of his outstanding literary work I noted that Hammett was a prominent supporter of the Stalinized American Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s. In that dead night of the "red scare", which many from that time and since would prefer to obliterate from American "democratic" memory, especially the memory of their own silence and complicity, just said no to the committees that wanted him to “name names.” He didn’t and paid the price for his courageous act. Others, including long time Stalinists and fellow–travelers squawked to high heaven before those committees, sometimes without the least bit of pressure. A simple acknowledgement of Hammett’s deed, noting along the way, that Hammett and our Trotskyist forbears were still political opponents at the end of the day seemed less than controversial.
Not so, at least from an e-mail that I received, claiming (for me) the mantle of Stalinophile for such a “tribute”. First, I assume that the person, for good or ill, had not read my "tributes” to arch-Stalinist American Communist Party supporters, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who I have termed “heroic” for their deeds in behalf of the Soviet Union, when those deeds counted. Or that if the person had deeds, like Hammett's, involving less than going to meet death fearlessly by Stalinists are not worthy of kudos. In any case, this person is all wrong.
Go back to the first question above where basically non-political types were noted for their contributions to human progress. That is the “missing link” to this person’s mistaken position. I could have gone on and on about various persons that have been honored in this American Left History blog. But that seemed to me to be unnecessarily hammering home the point. Here is the real point. We have had few enough occasions when our fellows get it right to narrow the parameters of what contributes to human progress. If we get too picky we are left with honoring Lenin, Trotsky, and a few other Bolsheviks. Oh yes, and, of course, those few of us who claim to be contemporary Bolsheviks- including, I presume, the heroic, non-Stalinophile, e-mail sender. Enough said.
Note: I did not mention this e-mail sender’s political affiliation although it was provided. Let us just put it this way. The organization that the person belongs to (and I am not sure the person knows all the organization’s history, it didn’t seem so) has a history of “bailing water” (my term)for the “progressive" wing of the Democratic party (whatever that is?) and wondered out loud why I did not honor the likes of California’s’ current Attorney General, Jerry Brown, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, ex-Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney,and so on. Jesus, give me a break. But, wait a minute, if the shades of old Dashiell Hammett were around today or those of some of his fellow reprobate Stalinists, those are the same kindreds that they would be kowtowing to, as well. Hey, I just tipped my hat to old Hammett I did not try to "steal" his "progressive/ popular front" political strategy. Strange bedfellows, indeed. Double, Jesus give me a break.
Markin comment:
First question: What do the murdered heroic Kansas abortion provider, Doctor George Tiller, the 17th century Puritan revolutionary poet and propagandist, John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, and the early 20th century labor and civil rights lawyer, Clarence Darrow, defender of “Big” Big Haywood and John Scopes, among others, have in common? Similar expertise in similar fields? No. Common political vision? Hell, no. Could it be that they, each in their own way, contributed to the store of our human progress? Well, yes. And also, by the way, they have all been honored on this American Left History site for those contributions. And nary a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them.
Second question: What do the pre-World War II American communist renegade from Marxism, Max Shachtman, the old English socialist and novelist turned British imperial informer, George Orwell, and the German “pope” of pre- World War I Marxism in the Second International , Karl Kautsky have in common? I will not prolong the agony on this one because I have to make my point before the next millennium so it is that they have made contributions to our common socialist movement before they went over to the other, pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist side (one way or the other). And also, by the way, they have all been honored on this American Left History site for those contributions. And nary a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them.
Third question: What do the old-fashioned 19th century French revolutionary and Paris Commune member, Louis–August Blanqui, the iconic American black liberation fighter, Malcolm X, and the old Industrial Workers of World (IWW-Wobblies) organizer extraordinaire, Vincent St. John, have in common? Again, I will cut to the chase; they were all, one way or the other, political opponents of Marxism. And also, by the way, they have all been honored on this American Left History site for those contributions. And nary a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them.
Okay, by my count I see zero legendary Bolshevik names listed above. Names like Leon Trotsky, V.I. Lenin, N. Krupskaya, J. Sverdlov, Jim Cannon, John Reed, “Big” Bill Haywood, and so on. Oh, they have been honored in this space, profusely. Of course. (Although I do not believe that there was a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them either, that was pure bourgeosi propaganda, always). And that is exactly my point here.
Let me back track on this one, a little. Recently I did a series of reviews of the work of American detective fiction writer, Dashiell Hammett. (see blogs, dated August 15-18, 2010). Beyond a review of his outstanding literary work I noted that Hammett was a prominent supporter of the Stalinized American Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s. In that dead night of the "red scare", which many from that time and since would prefer to obliterate from American "democratic" memory, especially the memory of their own silence and complicity, just said no to the committees that wanted him to “name names.” He didn’t and paid the price for his courageous act. Others, including long time Stalinists and fellow–travelers squawked to high heaven before those committees, sometimes without the least bit of pressure. A simple acknowledgement of Hammett’s deed, noting along the way, that Hammett and our Trotskyist forbears were still political opponents at the end of the day seemed less than controversial.
Not so, at least from an e-mail that I received, claiming (for me) the mantle of Stalinophile for such a “tribute”. First, I assume that the person, for good or ill, had not read my "tributes” to arch-Stalinist American Communist Party supporters, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who I have termed “heroic” for their deeds in behalf of the Soviet Union, when those deeds counted. Or that if the person had deeds, like Hammett's, involving less than going to meet death fearlessly by Stalinists are not worthy of kudos. In any case, this person is all wrong.
Go back to the first question above where basically non-political types were noted for their contributions to human progress. That is the “missing link” to this person’s mistaken position. I could have gone on and on about various persons that have been honored in this American Left History blog. But that seemed to me to be unnecessarily hammering home the point. Here is the real point. We have had few enough occasions when our fellows get it right to narrow the parameters of what contributes to human progress. If we get too picky we are left with honoring Lenin, Trotsky, and a few other Bolsheviks. Oh yes, and, of course, those few of us who claim to be contemporary Bolsheviks- including, I presume, the heroic, non-Stalinophile, e-mail sender. Enough said.
Note: I did not mention this e-mail sender’s political affiliation although it was provided. Let us just put it this way. The organization that the person belongs to (and I am not sure the person knows all the organization’s history, it didn’t seem so) has a history of “bailing water” (my term)for the “progressive" wing of the Democratic party (whatever that is?) and wondered out loud why I did not honor the likes of California’s’ current Attorney General, Jerry Brown, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, ex-Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney,and so on. Jesus, give me a break. But, wait a minute, if the shades of old Dashiell Hammett were around today or those of some of his fellow reprobate Stalinists, those are the same kindreds that they would be kowtowing to, as well. Hey, I just tipped my hat to old Hammett I did not try to "steal" his "progressive/ popular front" political strategy. Strange bedfellows, indeed. Double, Jesus give me a break.
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